Microsoft online services hit by major failure

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14851455

by erinwatson • 15 years ago

88 39 15 years ago

bbc.co.uk

egiva• 15 years ago

Hotmail: gave it up years ago for GMail. Office 365 (online): tried it out but never really got into it because I like GDocs a lot more. It's terrible that Microsoft online services went down, but it's unfortunate that it takes bad news to remind me that those services even exist.

barista3• 15 years ago

Are you sure what you tried was O365? It's so much more than GDocs.

51Cards• 15 years ago

I have to admit I really like Office365's Excel implementation, it is superior to GDocs Spreadsheet but the package as a whole is still not there...

Employees can edit GDocs on their tablets, Android Phones or iPhones with native apps or in the browser. Off365 offers none of these in most cases, requiring either a Win7 phone or a full PC browser client.

But the biggest kicker for for us is the ability to simultaneously edit word processing documents. We use this as a white board functionality when working through proposals either separately or on a conference call. Collaborative editing is a very powerful thing and last I saw Off365 only supports it in Excel.

I'm not saying that Microsoft isn't putting out a good product, just that they are still way behind GDocs as far as ease of access and core group features that they really need to step it up if they hope to grab back the mind share for online office products.

hopeless• 15 years ago

This happened overnight, millions of user were affected and it's been on HN for an hour... with only 1 comment prior to this one. I think that shows how much business Microsoft get from this community!

Edit: though interesting to note it was a DNS problem again. More hackery?

topbanana• 15 years ago

No such thing as overnight surely?

cstefanovici2• 15 years ago

30comments and 81 points. what are you talking about?

puredemo2• 15 years ago

Sounds like their overall uptime is still several sigmas deep. Comparable, if not higher than AWS even?

sunchild2• 15 years ago

Where do you get that info from? Isn't it a little early to extrapolate long-term uptime stats for a new service like O365? Maybe you were referring to the cloud infrastructure only, and not the app layer?

puredemo2• 15 years ago

The article contained some numbers. Approximately 4 hours of down time in a year and a half.

jerephil• 15 years ago

The actual Exchange Online infrastructure has been up and running in production for a couple of years supplying the Live@EDU service.

brudgers2• 15 years ago

Context: Google has experienced difficulties. Such is the nature of the cloud.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/172614/google_...

cryptoz• 15 years ago

Citing that article looks like you're grasping at straws trying to find something wrong with Google. It's from two years ago and clearly specifies in the opening that a small number of users were affected. Microsoft's services went out for everyone, and today.

If you're going to suggest Google has similar difficulties, you might be 100% right, but you should point to a more relevant, recent article. A Mail system going offline two years ago for a small number of users is very different.

brudgers2• 15 years ago

The article also links to other outages. Partial outages are frequent enough that they don't make news anymore and Google has a dashboard interface that shows them here:

http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en

The relevant context is that cloud services go down. There's nothing straws about that. Amazon experienced a large issue recently as well:

http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2011/04/the-aws-outage-the-clou...

drivebyacct2• 15 years ago

Google Docs was down for over an hour just two days ago when they were yapping about switching to the cloud to save energy and announcing offline apps.

boredguy82• 15 years ago

Docs has been down twice in the last two weeks during business hours. 9/7 it was down for about an hour, and 8/26 the Docs listing was down for about two hours (the listed time on the 26th is about an hour after we submitted the issue).

ditojim2• 15 years ago

the article you linked to was from 2 years ago. i guess you are saying microsoft is 2 years behind? google apps had 99.984% uptime last year. on pace for over 4 9's this year, including planned downtime. microsoft is the newbie here, and judging from their first few months, it is a long and winding road before they iron out the kinks in their cloud.

sunchild2• 15 years ago

Does Microsoft issue automatic downtime credits?

sek• 15 years ago

Look at your comments, you have some bias against Microsoft and Google.

ditojim2• 15 years ago

is calling it "Office 36X" leaving enough room for all the major outages the service will have in its first year?

rhplus• 15 years ago

Given that the mean length of a year is 365.2425 days, Office 365 only needs to maintain 99.93% uptime to stay true to its name.

cbs2• 15 years ago

Such a major problem is likely to raise questions about the reliability of cloud computing versus local storage.

Is anyone surprised this happened? It doesn't actually raise any questions about the reliability. Those answers were known when it was built. The first rule of network programming: the network is unreliable. The real question is: why do we keep playing along, blissfully ignoring that?

boredguy82• 15 years ago

Oh please: we don't play along blissfully ignoring that. Arguably the biggest contribution to information theory is Shannon's source coding theorem, and we haven't forgotten it.

For day-to-day work, the redundancy & reliability of something Google Docs is much greater than a client computer. RAID is expensive. Backplanes fail. Laptops fall. But now instead of waiting 2-4 hours for a reimage & file transfer, I can take a base image, go to docs.google.com, and be up and running in the time it takes to walk a laptop to my office. Or, if more pressing: in the time it takes to log in at my coworker's machine.

So I'm curious: what's with the pseudo-FUD?

cbs2• 15 years ago

>For day-to-day work, the redundancy & reliability of something Google Docs is much greater than a client computer.

Of google docs, yes. Of always having a network connection to docs, no. Maybe its just the environments I've been in, but at every client, employer, or place I've visited, my devices were more reliable than the network connection. Hell, last year the level 3 uplink for most of my state was out for a day.

In both cases you need a working computer to edit a file, but only one of them also requires a network connection. The only advantages you have are that software deploys faster because you're using a 21-centurly terminal emulator and the file under work is stored on the network.

Just because we as developers haven't put the solutions to quick and easy deployment of software packages and file redundancy into the hands of users doesn't make the cloud a panacea. We have these tools for us already. If my desktop fails, my latest-version files were on its hard drive, the network drive and usb flash drive, all synced after every save. I can grab a laptop or my co-workers machine and in the time it takes me to plug in a flash drive or just hit up a lan repository I'll have the files as they were at time of failure. If the other computer doesn't have the software, if I could hit up google docs on the other machine, I can easily smack 1 command into the terminal and in 30 seconds be ready to roll (and that server could be local, too, not relying on internet uplink). I'm not against relying on the network at all, but doing so in a manner that doesn't demand an always-on connection to get work done.

A solution that relies on the availability of network OR local machine and can gracefully handle the fault of one or the other is orders of magnitude more reliable than a solution that relies on BOTH network and local machine.

dpark• 15 years ago

Because the reality is that a computer without an Internet connection has no significant value for 99% of people.

Also, let's not forget that for most people, minor downtime is a nuisance, not a real problem. It's annoying when I can't reach a web service I rely on, but it rarely if ever costs me money. With businesses, this can be a different proposition, but even then the savings from going "to the cloud" may more than offset any downtime costs.

WettowelReactor• 15 years ago

Nothing is 100% reliable. The question is is the frequency/type of downtime vs. cost is more efficient (cost effective) in the cloud than doing it yourself. For some, especially small non-tech shops the answer is yes.

mattparcher• 15 years ago

Does anyone have an opinion on the reliability of Microsoft’s hosted Exchange services (or alternatives)? My boss would love to move his email into the cloud, but we keep seeing stories like this…

micampe• 15 years ago

Nobody posts their in-house services failures on the web.

cstefanovici2• 15 years ago

this messed up some stuff for us due to partial reliance on this at www.spottmusic.com. had to work to repair the database this morning. not fun.

Microsoft online services hit by major failure

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