If that, been an enterprise customer with a company that is a gold partner and been using Office365 for 7 years now - it's down so often we stopped monitoring it, easily the most flaky, unreliable, slow and poorly managed online service I've personally used. (Words are my own, not necessarily those of my employeer(s) etc...)
It takes them forever to fix stuff as well. For about 6 months it had “Reply Al” instead of “Reply All” on OWA. Trivial but it shows how crap their QA is.
And also it shows they don’t use their own products (the Reply All typo should shock the guy who owns the UI). The one software the dev team does use is Visual Studio, and it shows. It keeps evolving, not frozen in time in the 90s, the evolutions make sense, they are user centric, pretty much every version is a visible improvement over the previous version (except vs 2013). It’s basically the exact opposite of Office.
That theory breaks on Windows though. Is Microsoft a MacOS shop?
The same goes for Azure. Set up the wrong country / VAT / thing? Better migrate all your cloud services to a new account. No dropdown, no changes, no nothing.
My company has a subscription and the search functionality mysteriously and randomly doesn't work at times, or is really slow... I have to guess which one it is _this_ time when it starts acting up...
I find the same issue, on several occasions I've done some wireshark / tcpdumps on Outlook (desktop) traffic and it was quite shall we say 'messy', additionally as we notice emails sent via Office365 at times go missing or just never arrive (with no NDR), a couple of us started inspecting headers of Office365 sent emails and found them to be bouncing around internal Microsoft servers with broken certificates and NTP so out of sync that exchange online (or whatever component does this for their system) moved on to another server until it got to one that was working.
It leaves very little place for interpretation(works for me) when most of these reports have a kb/issue tracking# in microsoft dashboard - check the comments for issue numbers.
I find most of the time when Office365 (especially the mail or calendaring component aka Exchange online) is down - their status pages all say everything is fine, if you contact support no matter what you tell or provide to them they want you to reinstall Outlook.
I see Office 360 written a lot, and I'm convinced it's not 50/50 sarcasm and ignorance, but we'll never nail down the ratio, similar to nature vs nurture in behavioral science.
*Edit: I believe this includes Azure-AD, which I would assume would affect people using it for auth for non-Microsoft cloud products (perhaps even on-prem (if people do that?)).
A well run service run by a world-class team will provide global availability performance and service that small teams are incapable of.
However, in this case, I don't think the service is very well run, so there's downtime. Not really an issue with "the cloud", this is just an issue because of bad management and/or design of the system.
I wonder if this will be a wake up call to Microsoft to maybe allow offline use of things like OneNote. It's really unacceptable to have something that important so reliant on an online service.
(I doubt they'll change their tune. Theee years of complaints about this and they still refuse to allow local notebook storage on Mac, so it seems unlikely that they'd change their minds now.)
What's the alternative? Outlook is an offline app that most employees (technical and non-technical) know well how to use. The only other alternative (for enterprise) seems to be IBM Notes and that one isn't necessarily better (and often less liked by employees in my experience).
Thunderbird has a calendar and to-dos as well (though I never used them personally, so I can't speak to their quality). Does Outlook do any special integration between them (outside of just having them in the same app)?
Yes. It uses SMTP as a messaging channel for calendar invite sharing - sending a meeting invite to someone (through the calendar) sends them an email, which their outlook client picks up and treats as a calendar invite. It also integrates with Active Directory.
Not quite SMTP, but yeah. It's whole normal transport system. Add on to that things like integration with conference call systems (eg: Skype) for meeting and dial-in setup, conference room scheduling (Room Finder), and it's honestly a really nice tool for business use. It does a lot of things that users really like.
Piracy of Microsoft products that allow offline use is rampant, especially in poorer countries. A cloud service is a really good tool to prevent piracy.
Office365 still has a desktop executable, parallel to its online program. It's not all browser-only. I think that's why you two are talking past each other.
They're barely desktop apps - they're essentially bloated javascript heavy web-frame like apps that perform poorly, have many bugs (IMO 7~ years of use) and require login to Office365 / Azure online.
(While this is almost certainly the case for Office, a well-known leader in its category, it should be noted that this logic is not accurate for all products - Increased opportunity cost to the legal consumer and lack of piracy externalities such as network effects mean "always-online" requirements may be detrimental.)
piracy is only an issue if it effects people paying for your product; if they were never going to pay anyway, why not give it away for free? keeping a digital product locked away out of spite is just... spiteful
especially when it comes to poor economies! the cost of a windows/office license is a good portion of (if not an entire) yearly salary in some countries! removing the tools that help them to compete with more affluent economies is pretty poor form
> the cost of a windows/office license is a good portion of (if not an entire) yearly salary
In poorer economies you can just adjust the price to be comparable to local yearly salaries. It's not that piracy means that end users get the licenses for free any way: there are many people who sell pirated versions of Windows and Office.
> removing the tools that help them to compete
You can be just as competitive with Libreoffice and GNU/Linux as you can be with MS Office and MS Windows. The cime of piracy steals a giant market of hundreds of millions if not billions of people from Libreoffice and GNU/Linux and turns these people into second-class citizens.
For me that is easy. If used for personal use, make it free (and thus, more popular plus free bug reporting for bleeding edge versions). If used for commercial purposes, not free. Then go after businesses that use unlicensed copies of the software.
I can't speak for Microsoft, but I could imagine some type of negotiation on pricing based on several criteria. When businesses purchase licensing for such things, there is always a negotiation phase that starts around 60% discount and goes up or down based on many factors.
Hmmm that sounds like a perfect use case for...maybe those countries, rather than pirating Microsoft's products, use and contribute to open source projects, like libreoffice, and help make it a proper competition for expensive licensed products.
The status page reads as below (I've copied the text here as it a) may not be accessible to everyone and b) often has old information removed / edited, c) this status page / information is usually pay-walled and only available once you've authenticated):
--
Microsoft 365 Service health status
Title: Unable to access Microsoft 365 services
User impact: Affected users are unable to authenticate to and access Microsoft 365 services.
Current status: We've received reports of an issue affecting access to Microsoft 365 services. We've identified a degraded portion of infrastructure that manages authentication requests and have restarted that infrastructure to mitigate impact.
Scope of impact: This issue may potentially affect any of your users attempting to access Microsoft 365 services.
Start time: Tuesday, January 29, 2019, at 9:15 PM UTC
Preliminary root cause: A portion of infrastructure that manages authentication requests is degraded, affecting access to one or more Microsoft 365 services.
It's pretty common practice for complex systems. If it's already dead, and nobody knows what's wrong or how to fix it, you try restarting it. (normally you first redirect traffic to a different region, but apparently big orgs are still running critical infrastructure with changes that affect all regions and can't be backed out)
Update: "Preliminary root cause: A portion of third-party managed network infrastructure that facilitates authentication requests and access to Microsoft 365 services was degraded."
That doesn’t seem right. For something so critical to many of their corporate mega-customers, there shouldn’t be any “third-party managed” infrastructure at all.
That’s not how the internet works. Every large provider has third-party connectivity. There’s no wire from Microsoft to your house.
You can buy connectivity from 5 diverse providers per data center, but if one of them continues to advertise your routes while not being able to actually pass traffic to your destination, you’re “down” to some people through no fault of your own.
I’ve had this happen with AT&T, XO/Verizon, and Cogent in recent years. It’s not uncommon. In all cases it was mis-configured ISP routers. Usually a support engineer admits a QoS or DDoS-protection configuration went wrong.
Not sure why I was down-voted for this, it's a direct copy-paste of the service status page which a) may not be accessible to everyone and b) often has old information removed.
Also to note: status pages are, by their nature, transient. Having a record of what it previously said is helpful context for any discussion regarding those prior contents.
My ISP (Telefonica) currently doesn't return addresses for login.microsoftonline.de (cloud Germany) while Google's DNS servers do. I wonder if that's related.
Interesting, I suspecting their 'restart' of 'authentication infrastructure' may be a rolling restart and perhaps they have not got to Germany yet, perhaps by using Google's DNS different 'authentication infrastructure' is being provided?
We thought that too - gwmigprda.aadg.windows.net.nsatc.net seems / seemed to be failing to resolve, but then it seemed like it was internal to their infrastructure - which they later added to their status page (and clarified it was their authentication infrastructure which needed to be 'rebooted').
Not certainly not. Hypothetical scenario: realise something in your infrastructure will have problems in a few days’ time, and so make changes, which accidentally break things.
I don't understand, could you explain? Level3 may be the biggest backbone provider but I doubt that Microsoft is peering only with them are they? This is maybe something that a smaller company might do but Microsoft seems too large for that.
Wording of the communication to my organization indicated that Level 3 is handling some subset of Azure-internal networking. I don't think it's a peering issue.
And, while this may not be connected, Microsoft also seem to have deleted all of our Sensitive Information Policies in the Office 365 Security and Compliance Center overnight too. Policies that we running yesterday all seem to have been turned off or deleted this morning. This is a HUGE security risk. As I say it could be coinicidence but I'm not so sure.
For some reason, I cannot open files that are in my OneDrive folder without O365 authentication shitting itself, and refusing to save files. This means to edit files that are in OneDrive, I have to move them out of OneDrive, open them, edit them and save them, then move the back into OneDrive.
The situation with having a different fucking login/account for every single fucking Microsoft service (Skype, Office, etc.) even when you're on the business tier for them all is insane and endlessly frustrating.
There seems to be an attempt at a single-sign on solution, but when I used it about 2 years ago, it sent me a on trip to about 6 different domains (live.com, microsoft.com, office365.com, something with sharepoint in the name, and several subdomains of those).
In the past, I've given folks the tip to not open links if they send you to a different domain than the link suggests -- by that standard, the SSO looks like a complete scam. It takes some serious knowledge of the Microsoft products to know that those domains all belong to the same corporate entity.
You have to send the way to decrypt data via a different method than your send the encrypted data, otherwise the person who can intercept one can intercept the other.
If you email me a file which needs a password, and then the password, that's pointless, you have to phone me or post me the password.
In MS's case the way you see the document is to login to MS's servers using your email account (so an attacker could send a password reset), or an emailed one time code (so an attacker can intercept and use it, either first, or if they can change the intercepted channel, not pass it on)
it was a marketing stunt! "hey everybody! you know that big google outage today? we have a cloud too! it's big, and it goes down every once in a while just like google's and amazon's! we're a real internet company now too!"
Around the world millions of accountants were able to go home early as they couldn't twiddle some cells in their spreadsheets, middle managers were spared from death by PowerPoint and countless people weren't told about their use of passive voice by Word's grammar checker.
Yeah, my theory is that it's just about 2 weeks after everyone is back from holidays, which means all the engineers are back and ready to ship features and changes after nothing's been touched during the holidays. All this "go fever" is leading to somewhat reckless modifications of production systems.
Maybe it is just me but... The interest we here at HN have in showcasing service outages seems like it's mostly because we want to point to some big/other company and say "see they went down!" so we can feel better about it when our own services go down.
It may be that to a degree, but there is also a desire to point out reliability deficiencies in a product or platform that inevitably gets pushed down everyone's throats by management with low resistance to kool-aid.
The Office365 status page now states "There are currently no known issues preventing you from signing in to your Office 365 service health dashboard." and when you click the link and are forced to login (now that auth appears to be working for me at least) you're presented with an error preventing you from seeing service status or historical events stating "You don’t have permission to access this page or perform this action."
Could this have affected my ability to log into Skype for Business? I could log in with my home wifi, but not my cell phone hotspot. Didn't think much of it at the time!
> I would say is pretty fair and based on today’s events everyone affected could be eligible for 25% discount on their bill as the service credit for breaching 99.9% SLA is 25%
I need 365 since it can do some things Google docs can’t do.
But, a while ago there was a widespread bug making is so that some percentage of people who had used the Mac or iOS apps couldn’t sign in. It was never officially acknowledged, and only fixed due to random people getting journalists to write about an emailing randome people on other teams within Microsoft.
Their cloud stuff is good but the auth and account stuff is a total mess.
Not sure if it is related, but the safelink service (the thing that wraps a link with a jump) is down at my school's mail service (that uses MS suite).
Ironic to read all the negativity here when on the day after the OP Microsoft will announce quarterly earnings which will undoubtedly be driven by continued "Enterprise buy in to Microsoft Cloud Solutions".
Does that mean that you don't (ever) have to login to Microsoft / Office365 online services with the desktop software? I have been hearing that people are having issues with desktop apps asking them to log back in to use them - and they can't.
You don't have to log in anywhere. MS sells Office 365 and Office 2019, 365 being a subscription service and 2019 a one-time purchase. People you talk about probably had issues with desktop apps that were a part of O365.
I'm still using my copy of Office2008. It still works just fine. It never has an "authentication outage". And, as a bonus, it costs me nothing to continue to use it. I would feel sorry for all of the poor shmoes who are locked out of their office suites, but I'm sorry, you brought this no yourselves when you accepted a subscription model. If people just said no to the subscription model, no one would have this problem.
I don't think the complaints are about office suite access, as that has a fallback in case of failed auth. It's more about IM/VOIP/email, OneDrive/SharePoint, Azure cloud, etc.
For example, I often hear that O365 licenses are a bliss compared to complexity of microsoft enterprise licensing, when even ms reps don't agree how much licenses you need.
To be fair, "the licensing isn't completely miserable like their other product" isn't exactly a selling point.
My two cents from what I've seen (note mainly see GSuite sie of things).. You can get much more productivity & actual collaboration with G Suite, dependent on a few factors.
One, there has to be total buy-in @ the executive level because you most likely need to completely re-think how work gets done across every function. Often, we do what we've been doing and don't see the full picture because of that existing perspective.
So that requires a legit G Suite partner to help execute change management as for O365 I imagine. It's not so much a risk unless you do it for the wrong reasons; They've done it enough times to have a proven migration formula. Saving licensing costs for example should be on the bottom of your considerations because that more or less evens out and becomes irrelevant.
I know people make a big deal out of availability, but I personally don't usually mind that much when things go offline. I'm sure it could cause serious problems in specific situations though
Does anyone know how to get office 365 pro plus installed on a server to stop deactivating itself? Should we have just paid the insane amount for office enterprise or whatever the one time fee version?
How is it that everyone keeps screwing themselves with MSO when even if you pay for commercial use for libre office you come out way ahead. If you want to collaborate on a document or spreadsheet, you dont need to prostitute yourself to microsoft, its a case of being so self important and lazy that one more click or shifting between a telepresence application and an office suite application is to hard. All you people complaining about being down because msoffice products are unavailable need to get a grip on how to use a computer.
While I agree with your sentiments about the products, MS as a company and their software model, some of us are forced to use their products at work and of course some of us have tried to improve things and move away to more standards based and ethical software we don't always win (no pun intended) (and words are my own etc...)
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