Tell HN: Azure outage

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45748661

by tartieret • 9 months ago

885 806 9 months ago

news.ycombinator.com

Azure is down for us, we can't even access the azure portal. Are other experiencing this? Our services are located in Canada/Central and US-East 2

https://downdetector.ca/status/windows-azure/

https://azure.status.microsoft/en-gb/status

llimos• 9 months ago

Yep, down from here too (in Israel).

Services too, not just the portal.

andoma2• 9 months ago

Can confirm

andhuman2• 9 months ago

I bet it’s DNS.

andhuman2• 9 months ago

“ Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC, we began experiencing DNS issues resulting in availability degradation of some services. Customers may experience issues accessing the Azure Portal. We have taken action that is expected to address the portal access issues here shortly. We are actively investigating the underlying issue and additional mitigation actions. More information will be provided within 60 minutes or sooner.

This message was last updated at 16:35 UTC on 29 October 2025”

pbhjpbhj• 9 months ago

That was my bet too, then I looked at ISC and noticed there were PoCs released for critical BIND9 vulns yesterday ... might be related?

joaomoreno• 9 months ago

Yup, see it as well.

xuf• 9 months ago

Down here too (region West Europe)

voidpointer2000• 9 months ago

Down in Sweden Central as well (all our production systems are down)

chemodax2• 9 months ago

For me the same. It's very confusing that status page [1] is green

[1] https://azure.status.microsoft/en-us/status

martini333• 9 months ago

That status page is never red. Absolutely useless.

There are currently no active events. Use Azure Service Health to view other issues that may be impacting your services.

Links to a page on Azure Portal which is down...

endianswap• 9 months ago

It's red right now.

kylecazar• 9 months ago

They added a message at the same time as your comment:

"We are investigating an issue with the Azure Portal where customers may be experiencing issues accessing the portal. More information will be provided shortly."

reid3• 9 months ago

This is impacting the Azure CDN at azureedge.net. DNS A records for azureedge.net tenants are taking 2-6 seconds and often return nothing.

etyhhgfff• 9 months ago

It's always DNS, unless it's not DNS.

uuuubbbb• 9 months ago

Intune, Azure, Entra down in Switzerland

elFarto• 9 months ago

We saw all incoming traffic to our app drop to zero at about 15:45. I wonder how long this one will take to fix.

sech8420• 9 months ago

Same exact time for us as well.

vincebowdren• 9 months ago

UK, and other regions too; our APAC installation in Australia is affected.

kierenj4• 9 months ago

Ouch, and login.microsoftonline.com too - i.e. SSO using MS accounts. We'd just rolled that out across most (all?) of our internal systems...

And microsoft.com too - that's gotta hurt

ocdtrekkie• 9 months ago

I am still stunned people choose to do this, considering major Office 365 outages are basically a weekly thing now.

NetMageSCW2• 9 months ago

We are very dependent on Azure and Microsoft Authentication and Microsoft 365 and haven’t had weekly or even monthly issues. I can think of maybe three issues this year.

parliament325• 9 months ago

SSO and 365 are working fine for us, but admin portals for Azure/365 are down. Our workloads in Azure don't seem to be impacted.

planewave3• 9 months ago

It is interesting to see the differential across different tenants in different geographies:

- on a US tenant I am unable to access login.microsoftonline.com and the login flow stalls on any SSO authentication attempt.

- on a European tenant, probably germany-west, I am able to login and access the Azure portal.

manbitesdog• 9 months ago

Guess you have NASSO now (Not A Single Sign On)

btbuildem2• 9 months ago

It's Safe and Secure!

patching-trowel• 9 months ago

As of now Azure Status page still shows no incident. It must be manually updated, someone has to actively decide to acknowledge an issue, and they're just... not. It undermines confidence in that status page.

charles_f• 9 months ago

It shows that some people have issues accessing the portal.

baconbrand3• 9 months ago

I have never noticed that page being updated in a timely manner.

reid3• 9 months ago

Portal and Azure CDN are down here in the SF Bay Area. Tenant azureedge.net DNS A queries are taking 2-6 seconds and most often return nothing. I got a couple successful A response in the last 10 minutes.

Edit: As of 9:19 AM Pacific time, I'm now getting successful A responses but they can take several seconds. The web server at that address is not responding.

bronco21016• 9 months ago

Unable to access the portal and any hit to SSO for other corporate accesses is also broken. Seems like there's something wrong in their Identity services.

blenderob• 9 months ago

https://azure.status.microsoft/en-us/status says everything's fine! Any place I can read more about this outage?

reid3• 9 months ago

You're looking at it. I couldn't find any discussion elsewhere yet...

sbergot3• 9 months ago

official status pages are useless most of the time.

jeffrallen5• 9 months ago

I work for a cloud provider which is serious about transparency. Our customers know they are going to get the straight story from our status page.

When you find an honest vendor, cherish them. They are rare, and they work hard to earn and keep your confidence.

sbergot3• 9 months ago

now there is an information about "Azure Portal Access Issues". No word about front door being down.

kryogen1c2• 9 months ago

downdetector reports coincident cloudflare outage. is microsoft using cloudflare for management plane, or is there common infra? data center problem somewhere, maybe fiber backbone? BGP?

chemodax2• 9 months ago

It seems Azure FrontDoor is affected, because our private VM works fine in different regions.

rluhar• 9 months ago

Looks like AWS is also impacted?

zavec3• 9 months ago

Yeah the graph for that one looks exactly the same shape. I wonder if they were depending on some azure component somehow, or maybe there were things hosted on both and the azure failure made enough things failover to AWS that AWS couldn't cope? If that was the case I'd expect to see something similar with GCP too though.

Edit: nope looks like there's actually a spike on GCP as well

estel• 9 months ago

It's possibly more likely that people mis-attribute the cause of an outage to the wrong providers when they use downdetector.

kryogen1c2• 9 months ago

downdetector reports coincident cloudflare outage. is microsoft using cloudflare for management plane, or is there common infra? data center problem somewhere, maybe fiber backbone? BGP?

Mr_Bees696• 9 months ago

nope, dont see any cf issues.

kierenj4• 9 months ago

Sorry - my bad. I literally just connected an old XP VM to the internet to activate it.

ThatManulTheCat4• 9 months ago

Azure portal currently mostly not working (UK)... Downdetector reporting various Microsoft linked services are out (Minecraft, Microsoft 365, Xbox...)

mystcb3• 9 months ago

Updated 16:35 UTC

Azure Portal Access Issues

Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC, we began experiencing DNS issues resulting in availability degradation of some services. Customers may experience issues accessing the Azure Portal. We have taken action that is expected to address the portal access issues here shortly. We are actively investigating the underlying issue and additional mitigation actions. More information will be provided within 60 minutes or sooner.

This message was last updated at 16:35 UTC on 29 October 2025

----

Azure Portal Access Issues

We are investigating an issue with the Azure Portal where customers may be experiencing issues accessing the portal. More information will be provided shortly.

This message was last updated at 16:18 UTC on 29 October 2025

-- From the Azure status page

NDizzle5• 9 months ago

My best guess at the moment is something global like the CDN is having problems affecting things everywhere. I'm able to use a legacy application we have that goes directly to resources in uswest3, but I'm not able to use our more modern application which uses APIM/CDN networks at all.

mystcb3• 9 months ago

Update 16:57 UTC:

Azure Portal Access Issues

Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC, we began experiencing Azure Front Door issues resulting in a loss of availability of some services. In addition. customers may experience issues accessing the Azure Portal. Customers can attempt to use programmatic methods (PowerShell, CLI, etc.) to access/utilize resources if they are unable to access the portal directly. We have failed the portal away from Azure Front Door (AFD) to attempt to mitigate the portal access issues and are continuing to assess the situation.

We are actively assessing failover options of internal services from our AFD infrastructure. Our investigation into the contributing factors and additional recovery workstreams continues. More information will be provided within 60 minutes or sooner.

This message was last updated at 16:57 UTC on 29 October 2025

---

Update: 16:35 UTC:

Azure Portal Access Issues

This message was last updated at 16:35 UTC on 29 October 2025

---

Azure Portal Access Issues

We are investigating an issue with the Azure Portal where customers may be experiencing issues accessing the portal. More information will be provided shortly.

This message was last updated at 16:18 UTC on 29 October 2025

---

Message from the Azure Status Page: https://azure.status.microsoft/en-gb/status

jdc05892• 9 months ago

yea its not just the portal. microsoft.com is down too

mystcb3• 9 months ago

Yeah, I am guessing it's just a placeholder till they get more info. I thought I saw somewhere that internally within Microsoft it's seen as a "Sev 1" with "all hands on deck" - Annoyingly I can't remember where I saw it, so if someone spots it before I do, please credit that person :D

Edit: Typo!

daxfohl• 9 months ago

Downdetector says aws and gcp are down too. Might be in for a fun day.

planewave3• 9 months ago

yes, and it seems that at least for some login.microsoftonline.com is down too, which is part of the Entra login / SSO flow.

PeterCorless• 9 months ago

Seems all Microsoft-related domains are impacted in some way.

• https://www.xbox.com/en-US also doesn't fully paint. Header comes up, but not the rest of the page.

• https://www.minecraft.net/en-us is extremely slow, but eventually came up.

bossyTeacher4• 9 months ago

It sure must be embarrassing for the website of the second richest company in the world to be down.

ThatManulTheCat4• 9 months ago

DNS. Ofc.

8cvor6j844qw_d62• 9 months ago

I'll be interested in the incident writeup since DNS is mentioned. It will be interesting in a way if it is similar to what happened at AWS.

Insanity4• 9 months ago

It's pretty unlikely. AWS published a public 'RCA' https://aws.amazon.com/message/101925/. A race condition in a DNS 'record allocator' causing all DNS records for DDB to be wiped out.

I'm simplifying a bit, but I don't think it's likely that Azure has a similar race condition wiping out DNS records on _one_ system than then propagates to all others. The similarity might just end at "it was DNS".

layer82• 9 months ago

DNS has both naming and cache invalidation, so no surprise it’s among the hardest things to get right. ;)

jjp• 9 months ago

Whilst the status message acknowledge's the issue with Front Door (AFD), it seems as though the rest of the actions are about how to get Portal/internal services working without relying on AFD. For those of us using Front Door does that mean we're in for a long haul?

llama0524• 9 months ago

Please migrate off of front door. It's been a failure mode since it came out historically. Anything else is better at this point

progmetaldev7• 9 months ago

Currently even the Front Door landing page is only partially loading.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/frontdoor

planewave3• 9 months ago

Azure Network Availability Issues

Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC, we began experiencing Azure Front Door issues resulting in a loss of availability of some services. We suspect that an inadvertent configuration change as the trigger event for this issue. We are taking two concurrent actions where we are blocking all changes to the AFD services and at the same time rolling back to our last known good state.

We have failed the portal away from Azure Front Door (AFD) to mitigate the portal access issues. Customers should be able to access the Azure management portal directly.

We do not have an ETA for when the rollback will be completed, but we will update this communication within 30 minutes or when we have an update.

This message was last updated at 17:17 UTC on 29 October 2025

croemer5• 9 months ago

"We have initiated the deployment of our 'last known good' configuration. This is expected to be fully deployed in about 30 minutes from which point customers will start to see initial signs of recovery. Once this is completed, the next stage is to start to recover nodes while we route traffic through these healthy nodes."

"This message was last updated at 18:11 UTC on 29 October 2025"

cyptus4• 9 months ago

AFD is down quite often regionally in Europe for our services. In 50%+ the cases they just don‘t report it anywhere, even if its for 2h+.

RajT888• 9 months ago

Spam those Azure tickets. If you have a CSAM, build them a nice powerpoint telling the story of all your AFD issues (that's what they are there for).

In 50%+ the cases they just don‘t report it anywhere, even if its for 2h+.

I assume you mean publicly. Are you getting the service health alerts?

hallh• 9 months ago

Same experience. We've recently migrated fully away from AFD due to how unreliable it is.

nevf1• 9 months ago

This is the single most frustrating thing about these incidents. As you're harmstrung on what you can do or how you can react until Microsoft officially acknowledges a problem. Took nearly 90mins both today and when it happened on 9th October.

jonathanlydall3• 9 months ago

Yet another reason to move away from Front Door.

We already had to do it for large files served from Blob Storage since they would cap out at 2MB/s when not in cache of the nearest PoP. If you’ve ever experienced slow Windows Store or Xbox downloads it’s probably the same problem.

I had a support ticket open for months about this and in the end the agent said “this is to be expected and we don’t plan on doing anything about it”.

We’ve moved to Cloudflare and not only is the performance great, but it costs less.

Only thing I need to move off Front Door is a static website for our docs served from Blob Storage, this incident will make us do it sooner rather than later.

out_sider4• 9 months ago

we are considering the same but because our website uses APEX domain we would need to move all DNS resolver to cloudfront right ? Does it have as a nice "rule set builder" as azure ?

nosefrog• 9 months ago

Front Door is not good.

eddie_catflap• 9 months ago

We saw issues before 16:00 UTC - approx 15:38

rconti• 9 months ago

Sounds like they need to move their portal to a region with more capacity for the desired instance type. /s

NDizzle5• 9 months ago

They briefly had a statement about using Traffic Manager to work with your AFD to work around this issue, with a link to learn.microsoft.com/...traffic-manager, and the link didn't work. Due to the same issue affecting everyone right now.

They quickly updated the message to REMOVE the link. Comical at this point.

Aperocky4• 9 months ago

The statement is still there though on the status page though

somerandomness• 9 months ago

yep having trouble logging into https://entra.microsoft.com/ as well

baconbrand3• 9 months ago

All of our sites went down. This is my company’s busiest time of year. Hooray.

a_f• 9 months ago

Looks like MyGet is impacted too. Seems like they use Azure:

What is required to be able to use MyGet? ... MyGet runs its operations from the Microsoft Azure in the West Europe region, near Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Sharparam2• 9 months ago

The learning modules on https://learn.microsoft.com/ also seem to have a lot of issues properly loading.

alt2279• 9 months ago

Cant access certain banking websites in the UK, I am assuming it because of this.

https://www.natwest.com/

baconbrand3• 9 months ago

Our Azure DevOps site is still functioning and our Azure hosted databases are accessible. Everything else is cooked.

tyfon• 9 months ago

Seems to be down in Norway.

Even the national digital id service is down.

hexbin010• 9 months ago

Even the national digital id service is down.

Can't help but smirk as my country is ramming through "Digital ID" right now

bombcar6• 9 months ago

Someone somewhere thought that "national digital ID service" should absolutely rely on a cloud provider in and from another country.

What a time to be alive.

llama0524• 9 months ago

Just another day with microsoft. Honestly pretty tiring as something is always generally broken.

ZeroConcerns• 9 months ago

Oh, well, I'm sure Azure will be given the same pass that AWS got here recently when they had their 12-hour outage...

taeric3• 9 months ago

I didn't realize AWS got a pass?

graemep3• 9 months ago

Have repeated outages lost them customers? has it lost them any money in any way?

That is a pass.

thewisenerd• 9 months ago

they recently had an incident with front door reachability, wonder if it's back.

QNBQ-5W8

djeastm• 9 months ago

I'm mid-deployment, but thankfully it seems to be running ok so far. Just the portal is not working so my visibility is not good.

nartaczact• 9 months ago

Sounds like Shrodinger's Deploy

siva7• 9 months ago

auth services are down

barpol• 9 months ago

still down

Jamie4522• 9 months ago

Currently standing in a half closed supermarket because the tills are down and they cant take payments

SoftTalker3• 9 months ago

Mind-boggling that any retailer would not have the capability to at least run the checkout stations offline.

withinboredom• 9 months ago

I knew an old guy in the '00s who specialized in cobal/fortran for working on tiller software. Guess he retired and they couldn't maintain it

tcmart142• 9 months ago

You can, but it's all about risk mitigation. Most processors have some form of store and forward (and it can have limitations like only X number of transactions). Some even have controls to limit the amount you can store-and-forward (for instance, only charges under $50). But ultimately, it's still risk mitigation. You can store-and-forward, but you're trusting that the card/account has the funds. If it doesn't, you loose and ain't shit you can do about it. If you can't tolerate any risk, you don't turn on store and forward systems and then you can't process cards offline.

Its not the we are not capable. Its, is the business willing to assume the risk?

bombcar6• 9 months ago

Most retailers trust their cashiers a bit less than they trust the customers. They'd rather shut down during a power/Internet failure than give any autonomy to the worker drones.

chasd005• 9 months ago

There's a Family Dollar by my house that is down at least 2 full days per month because of bad inet connectivity. I live close enough that with a small tower on my roof i can get line of sight to theirs. I've thought about offering them a backup link off my home inet if they give me 50% of sales whenever its in use. It would be a pretty good deal for them, better some sales when their inet is down vs none.

ryandrake2• 9 months ago

You'd think any SeriousBusiness would have a backup way to take customers' money. This is the one thing you always want to be able to do: accept payment. If they made it so they can't do that, they deserve the hit to their revenue. People should just walk out of the store with the goods if they're not being charged.

Why doesn't someone in the store at least have one of those manual kachunk-kachunk carbon copy card readers in the back that they can resuscitate for a few days until the technology is turned back on? Did they throw them all away?

jrodom• 9 months ago

50% of sales? what do you think the gross margin is on average for each item sold?

BenjiWiebe2• 9 months ago

Pretty sure it'd be a lot better deal for them to have no sales than to pay out 50% of sales on stuff with single digit margins.

david422• 9 months ago

IIRC, the grocery chain I worked for used to have an offline mode to move customers out the door. But it meant that when the system came back online, if the customers card was denied, the customer got free groceries.

cyberax3• 9 months ago

I remember that banks will try to honor the transactions, even if the customer's balance/credit limit is exhausted. It doesn't apply only to some gift cards.

tcmart142• 9 months ago

Yea, good old store and forward. We implemented it in our PoS system. Now, we do non PCI integrations so we arn't in PCI scope, but depending on the processor, it can come with some limitations. Like, you can do store and forward, but only up to X number of transactions. I think for one integration, it's 500-ish store wide (it uses a local gateway that store and forwards to the processors gateway). The other integration we have, its 250, but store and forward on device, per device.

onionisafruit4• 9 months ago

What I gather from this is to always try a dead card first just in case the store is in offline mode

reaperducer4• 9 months ago

IIRC, the grocery chain I worked for used to have an offline mode to move customers out the door.

Chick-fil-a has this.

One of the tech people there was on HN a few years ago describing their system. Credit card approval slows down the line, so the cards are automatically "approved" at the terminal, and the transaction is added to a queue.

The loss from fraudulent transactions turns out to be less than the loss from customers choosing another restaurant because of the speed of the lines.

ransom1538• 9 months ago

I was shopping at a mall with a visa vanilla card once. I got it as a gift and didn't know the limit. No matter what I bought the card kept going -- and I never got a balance of what was on the card. Eventually, later that day it stopped. I called customer support and asked how much was left on the balance. They told me they had no idea my balance - but everything I bought was mine.

pndy2• 9 months ago

I remember last mechanical cash registers in my country in 90s and when these got replaced by early electronic ones with blue vacuum fluorescent tubes. Then everything got smaller and smaller. Now I'm pestered to "add the item to the cart" by software.

Last week I couldn't pay for flowers for grandma's grave because smartphone-sized card terminal refused to work - it stuck on charging-booting loop so I had to get cash. Tho my partner thinks she actually wanted to get cash without a receipt for herself excluding taxes

Jamie4522• 9 months ago

Just to add - this particular supermarket wasn’t fully down, it took ages for them to press “sub total” and then pick the payment method. I suspect it was slow waiting for a request to timeout perhaps

reaperducer4• 9 months ago

Currently standing in a half closed supermarket because the tills are down and they cant take payments

There's a fairly large supermarket near me that has both kinds of outages.

Occasionally it can't take cards because the (fiber? cable?) internet is down, so it's cash only.

Occasionally it can't take cash because the safe has its own cellular connection, and the cell tower is down.

I was at Frank's Pizza in downtown Houston a few weeks ago and they were giving slices of pizza away because the POS terminal died, and nobody knew enough math to take cash. I tried to give them a $10 and told them to keep the change, but "keep the change" is an unknown phrase these days. They simply couldn't wrap their brains around it. But hey, free pizza!

thisOtterBeGood• 9 months ago

In Germany many stores still accept cash and some even only accept cash and we are ridiculed for this... Seems like one of the rare instances where this is useful :D

bombcar6• 9 months ago

It's sad the number of stores I've seen where they just shut down when they can't use the checkout machines; the clerks aren't allowed to do math even if they could.

Whereas the smaller, owner-run stores have more leeway; the local tiny grocery "sold" all freezer/refrigerator food for cheap/free during a power failure. The big Walmart closed and threw everything away the next day.

the_black_hand2• 9 months ago

why tf would a supermarket depend on Azure? Payment processing isn't their thing

twodave• 9 months ago

Appears to be an issue in Front Door. Our back end stuff is fine but FD is bouncing everything.

NDizzle5• 9 months ago

Yeah, I have non prod environments that don't use FD that are functioning. Routing through FD does not work. And a different app, nonprod doesn't use FD (and is working) but loads assets from the CDN (which is not working).

FD and CDN are global resources and are experiencing issues. Probably some other global resources as well.

Hate to say it, but DNS is looking like it's still the undisputed champ.

borg16• 9 months ago

i guess folks in azure wanted to show some solidarity with aws brethren

(couldn't resist adding it. i acknowledge this comment adds no value to the discussion)

aurumque• 9 months ago

Azure goes down all the time. On Friday we had an entire regional service down all day. Two weeks ago same thing different region. You only hear about it when it's something everyone uses like the portal, because in general nobody uses Azure unless they're held hostage.

Mr_Bees696• 9 months ago

Yeah, im regretting my decision to buy an xbox now. Every once in a while, everything goes down.

8cvor6j844qw_d62• 9 months ago

Quite close to the recent AWS outage. Let me take a look if its a major one similar to AWS.

Any guess on what's causing it?

In hindsight, I guess the foresight of some organizations to go multi-cloud was correct after all.

conroydave• 9 months ago

cost cutting attempts

iAMkenough2• 9 months ago

Trusting AI without sufficient review and oversight of changes to production.

shepherdjerred• 9 months ago

Do you have any insight or do you just dislike AI? Incidents like this happened long before AI generated code

whynotminot• 9 months ago

Yeah, these things never happened when humans were trusted without sufficient review and oversight of changes to production.

stuff4ben• 9 months ago

It's always freakin DNS...

jcims2• 9 months ago

We're multi-cloud and it really saved a few workloads last week with the AWS issue.

It's not easy though.

sanskarix• 9 months ago

This is the eternal tension for early-stage builders, isn't it? Multi-cloud gives you resilience, but adds so much complexity that it can actually slow down shipping features and iterating.

I'm curious—at what point did you decide the overhead was worth it? Was it after experiencing an outage, or did you architect for it from day one?

As someone launching a product soon (more on the builder/product side than infra-engineer), I keep wrestling with this. The pragmatist in me says "start simple, prove the concept, then layer in resilience." But then you see events like this week and think "what if this happens during launch?"

How did you handle the operational complexity? Did you need dedicated DevOps folks, or are there patterns/tools that made it manageable for a smaller team?

tartieret3• 9 months ago

Microsoft posted an update on X: https://x.com/AzureSupport/status/1983569891379835372?ref_sr...

"We’re investigating an issue impacting Azure Front Door services. Customers may experience intermittent request failures or latency. Updates will be provided shortly."

llama0524• 9 months ago

Always fun when you can't trust the main status page but have to go to some opinionated social medial website to see the actual problem.

drjasonharrison• 9 months ago

https://www.cbc.ca/news/investigates/tesla-grok-mom-9.695693...

This mom’s son was asking Tesla’s Grok AI chatbot about soccer. It told him to send nude pics, she says

xAI, the company that developed Grok, responds to CBC: 'Legacy Media Lies'

vanviegen4• 9 months ago

Many (all?) LinkedIn profiles are also down for me. Luckily the frontpage still works. ;-)

Go cloud!

AznHisoka• 9 months ago

Luckily?

SoftTalker3• 9 months ago

We're on Office 365 and so far it's still responding. At least Outlook and Teams is.

jeffdn• 9 months ago

They don't run on Azure!

rcarmo3• 9 months ago

Are you absolutely sure?

RajT888• 9 months ago

They definitely do run on Azure. Probably not 100%, but at least some footprint of those services do.

ape42• 9 months ago

2026: the year of your own metal in a rack

drewnick• 9 months ago

I've been doing it since 1998 in my bedroom with a dual T1 (and on to real DCs later). While I've had some outages for sure it makes me feel better I am not that divergent in uptime in the long run vs big clouds.

dylan6042• 9 months ago

Are you still on a dual T1? that's gotta be expensive

Aperocky4• 9 months ago

I'd predict the year of linux desktop instead.

hshdhdhehd7• 9 months ago

At least YOLD is possible. Is there capacity in the world for everyone to ditch clouds.

0xbadcafebee2• 9 months ago

2027: the year of migrating from your own metal to a managed provider

2028: the year of migrating from a managed provider to the cloud

2029: the year of migrating from the cloud to your own metal in a rack

People keep thinking the solution to their problems is to do something new (that they don't fully understand).

TIL it's called Nirvana Fallacy

reaperducer4• 9 months ago

TIL it's called Nirvana Fallacy

We used to call it "The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence."

hshdhdhehd7• 9 months ago

The upside of keep moving it acts as a hardener and chaos monkey. You shake out any crufty service no one knows how to build let alone deploy.

t0lo• 9 months ago

Just experienced this with moving around multiple states and universities in the past year :) Grass really was greener in my hometown

majnata• 9 months ago

The Azure API is still working though.

m_fayer3• 9 months ago

And there goes https://www.microsoft.com/

rawgabbit• 9 months ago

Meanwhile the layoffs continue https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/microsoft-ceo-exp...

ctoth• 9 months ago

Layoffs will continue until uptime improves!

onraglanroad• 9 months ago

Now that is actually funny!

FeteCommuniste• 9 months ago

[Satya Nadella] said that the company’s future opportunity was to bring AI to all eight billion people on the planet.

But what if I don't want AI brought to me?

ryandrake2• 9 months ago

Like most technology initiative these tech CEOs dream up: You're going to get it and swallow it, whether you want it or not.

mring336212• 9 months ago

Sounds like someone has a case of the 'Mondays'...

gcanyon• 9 months ago

Real life Pluribus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluribus_(TV_series)

bostik• 9 months ago

You'll have to find another planet.

Although judging by the available transports it will likely be colonized by nazis.

the_af2• 9 months ago

I especially like how Nadella speaks of layoffs as some kind of uncontrollable natural disaster, like a hurricane, caused by no-one in particular. A kind of "God works in mysterious ways".

    > “Microsoft is being recognized and rewarded at levels never seen before,” Nadella wrote. “And yet, at the same time, we’ve undergone layoffs. This is the enigma of success in an industry that has no franchise value.”
     
    > Nadella explained the disconnect between thriving financials and layoffs by stating that “progress isn’t linear” and that it is “sometimes dissonant, and always demanding.”

I've read the whole memo and it's actually worse than those excerpts. Nadella doesn't even claim these were low performers:

    > These decisions are among the most difficult we have to make. They affect people we’ve worked alongside, learned from, and shared countless moments with—our colleagues, teammates, and friends.

Ok, so Microsoft is thriving, these were friends and people "we've learned from", but they must go because... uh... "progress isn't linear". Well, thanks Nadella! That explains so much!

Steven_Vellon• 9 months ago

For us, it looks like most services are still working (eastus and eastus2). Our AKS cluster is still running and taking requests. Failures seem limited to management portal.

vinyl7• 9 months ago

Vibe coded internet keeps getting better

avgDev2• 9 months ago

Quick find someone who can actually read documentation and code!

the_af2• 9 months ago

You just paste the outage error codes back to the LLM and pray it's still working and can fix whatever went wrong!

m_fayer3• 9 months ago

When all the people forget to code for themselves, every LLM will code itself out of existence with that one last bug. One, after another.

rvz• 9 months ago

Looking forward to the post mortem.

internet_points• 9 months ago

What went wrong and why?
An inadvertent tenant configuration change within Azure Front Door (AFD) triggered a widespread service disruption affecting both Microsoft services and customer applications dependent on AFD for global content delivery. The change introduced an invalid or inconsistent configuration state that caused a significant number of AFD nodes to fail to load properly, leading to increased latencies, timeouts, and connection errors for downstream services.
As unhealthy nodes dropped out of the global pool, traffic distribution across healthy nodes became imbalanced, amplifying the impact and causing intermittent availability even for regions that were partially healthy. We immediately blocked all further configuration changes to prevent additional propagation of the faulty state and began deploying a ‘last known good’ configuration across the global fleet. Recovery required reloading configurations across a large number of nodes and rebalancing traffic gradually to avoid overload conditions as nodes returned to service. This deliberate, phased recovery was necessary to stabilize the system while restoring scale and ensuring no recurrence of the issue.
The trigger was traced to a faulty tenant configuration deployment process. Our protection mechanisms, to validate and block any erroneous deployments, failed due to a software defect which allowed the deployment to bypass safety validations. Safeguards have since been reviewed and additional validation and rollback controls have been immediately implemented to prevent similar issues in the future.

So, so far they're saying it's a combination of bad config + their config-validator had a bug. Would love more details.

Aldipower2• 9 months ago

We have some trouble with the AFD in Germany too.

rcarmo3• 9 months ago

Not seeing it. I have VMs in US East and Netherlands and they're up.

tgv• 9 months ago

I tried to look some things up on their support pages before 1600Z, and it timed-out. The Dutch railways are also affected (they're an MS shop, IIRC).

giantg2• 9 months ago

Compare the comments and news coverage on this compared to the AWS outage... pretty telling.

Uehreka• 9 months ago

I noticed that Starbucks mobile ordering was down and thought “welp, I guess I’ll order a bagel and coffee on Grubhub”, then GrubHub was down. My next stop was HN to find the common denominator, and y’all did not disappoint.

hypeatei3• 9 months ago

Starbucks mobile was down during the AWS outage too...

Hamuko2• 9 months ago

Gonna build my application to be multicloud so that it requires multiple cloud platforms to be online at the same time. The RAID 0 of cloud computing.

andoma2• 9 months ago

Go multi-cloud they said...

SoftTalker3• 9 months ago

They are multi-cloud --- vulnerable to all outages!

pants2• 9 months ago

Good thing HN is hosted on a couple servers in a basement. Much more reliable than cloud, it seems!

parliament325• 9 months ago

Always has been.

lysace• 9 months ago

It was on AWS at least (for a while) in 2022.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32030400

dang• 9 months ago

Just don't use genetically identical hardware:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32031639

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32032235

Edit: wow, I can't believe we hadn't put https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32031243 in https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights. Fixed now.

sergiotapia• 9 months ago

Wow I just left a Starbucks drivethru line because it was just not moving. I guess it was because of this.

iso16312• 9 months ago

You'd think that Starbucks execs would be held accountable for the fragile system they have put in place.

But they won't be.

01284a7e• 9 months ago

Ha, maybe rethink the I AM NOTHING BUT A HUGE CLOUD CONSUMER thing on some fundamental levels? Like food?

Theodores• 9 months ago

My inner Nelson-from-the-Simpsons wishes I was on your team today, able to flaunt my flask of tea and homemade packed sandwiches. I would tease you by saying 'ha ha!' as your efforts to order coffee with IP packets failed.

I always go everywhere adequately prepared for beverages and food. Thanks to your comment, I have a new reason to do so. Take out coffees are actually far from guaranteed. Payment systems could go down, my bank account could be hacked or maybe the coffee shop could be randomly closed. Heck, I might even have an accident crossing the road. Anything could happen. Hence, my humble flask might not have the top beverage in it but at least it works.

We all design systems with redundancy, backups and whatnot, but few of us apply this thinking to our food and drink. Maybe get a kettle for the office and a backup kettle, in case the first one fails?

port113• 9 months ago

I noticed it when my Netatmo rigamajig stopped notifying me of bad indoor air quality. Lovely. Why does it need to go through the cloud if the data is right there in the home network…

pasc1878• 9 months ago

Same here for netatmo - ironically I replied to an incident report with netatmo saying all was OK when the whole system was falling over.

However netatmo does need to have a server to store data as you need to consolidate acreoss devices plus you can query gfor a year's data and that won't and can't be held locally.

jeffrallen5• 9 months ago

You know you can talk to your barista and ask for a bagel, right? If you're lucky they still take cash... if you still _have_ cash. :)

0_____0• 9 months ago

I was at a McDs a couple months back and I'm pretty sure you had to use the kiosk to order. Some places are deprecating the cashier entirely.

Havoc2• 9 months ago

The sysadmin subreddit tends to beat hn on outage reports by an hour+ in my experience.

Bunch of on-call peeps over there that definitely know the instant something major goes down

garbagewoman• 9 months ago

Service culture is so hollow

avgDev2• 9 months ago

I am having a bunch of issues. It looks like their sites and azure are both affected.

I also got weird notification in VS2022 that my license key was upgraded to Enterprise, but we did not purchase anything.

ThatManulTheCat4• 9 months ago

Free upgrade

Mr_Bees696• 9 months ago

Might be a failsafe, if you cant get a license status, and you're aware that MS is down, just default to the highest tier.

vs4vijay• 9 months ago

Service Status: https://status.cloud.microsoft/ and https://azure.status.microsoft/en-us/status

ipsum2• 9 months ago

Status page (first link) is down for me. Second one works

charv• 9 months ago

oh the irony, the status link being down too

aftergibson• 9 months ago

Looks like the status page is overloaded...

mythz• 9 months ago

High availability is touted as a reason for their high prices, but I swear I read about major cloud outages far more than I experience any outages at Hetzner.

bad_haircut72• 9 months ago

Same with DigitalOcean. I run one box and it hasnt gone down for like 2 years

yabones• 9 months ago

DO has been shockingly reliable for me. I shut down a neglected box almost 900 days uptime the other day. In that time AWS has randomly dropped many of my boxes with no warning requiring a manual stop/start action to recover them... But everybody keeps telling me that DO isn't "as reliable" as the big three are.

robotnikman2• 9 months ago

Same here, I run a few droplets for personal projects and never had any issues with then.

ipdashc• 9 months ago

To be fair, in the AWS/Azure outages, I don't think any individual (already created) boxes went down, either. In AWS' case you couldn't start up new EC2 instances, and presumably same for Azure (unless you bypass the management portal, I guess). And obviously services like DynamoDB and Front Door, respectively, went down. Hetzner/DO don't offer those, right? Or at least they're not very popular.

bongodongobob2• 9 months ago

It's just the admin portal.

NDizzle5• 9 months ago

It's absolutely not only the admin portal.

It's CDN and FrontDoor at least.

Foobar8568• 9 months ago

Plenty of sites are down and/or login not available. It's just really a mess.

_vqpz• 9 months ago

The bank I work at is reporting all Power Apps applications are down.

12_throw_away3• 9 months ago

Nope, more than the portal. For instance, I just searched for "Azure Front Door" because I hadn't heard of it before (I now know it's a CDN), and neither the product page itself [1] nor the technical docs [2] are coming up for me.

[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/frontdoor

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/frontdoor/front-door...

pocketman• 9 months ago

It looks like it is just the 365 admin panels for us. Admittedly, we don't currently host any other services on Azure though.

graemep3• 9 months ago

Ostensible reason.

The real reason is that outages are not your fault. Its the new version of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" - later it became MS, and now its any big cloud provider.

jmaker• 9 months ago

For one it’s statistics - Hetzner simply runs far fewer major services than hyperscalers. And the services they run are also more affluent, with larger customer bases, so downtimes are systemically critical. Therefore it’s louder.

On the merits though, I agree, haven’t had any serious issues with Hetzner.

prmoustache2• 9 months ago

I think the biggest features of the big cloud vendors is that when they are down, not only you but your customers and your competitors usually have issues at the same time so everybody just shrug and have a lazy/off day at the same time. Even on call teams reall just have to wait and stay on standby because there is very little they can do. Doing a failover can be slower than waiting for the recovery, not help at all if outage is spanned accross several region, or bring aditional risks.

And more importantly nobody lose any reputation except AWS/Azure/Google.

zavec3• 9 months ago

It's like back in school when there was a snow day!

dlcarrier2• 9 months ago

Yesterday Amazon, today Microsoft. Are Google's cloud services going down tomorrow?

m_fayer3• 9 months ago

And if they don't, we'll know who the culprit is.

shishcat• 9 months ago

Who?

Insanity4• 9 months ago

Maybe they are and no one realized yet.. :P

That said, I don't hear about GCP outages all that often. I do think AWS might be leading in outages, but that's a gut feeling, I didn't look up numbers.

xenolithis• 9 months ago

fairly certain they had a significant multi region outage within the past few years. I'll try to find some details to link.

Few customers....few voices to complain as well.

Mr_Bees696• 9 months ago

as a victim of xbox, azure is down 'bout as often as its up

luhn• 9 months ago

They had a pretty massive one earlier this year. https://status.cloud.google.com/incidents/ow5i3PPK96RduMcb1S...

This isn't GCP's fault, but the outage ended up taking down Cloudflare too, so in total impact I think that takes the cake.

briffle• 9 months ago

here's hoping its Oracle's cloud instead....

gtowey• 9 months ago

This is because Azure just copies everything AWS does. Google is a bit more innovative, they will have something else unexpected happen.

dkdcio• 9 months ago

throwback to when they deleted a customer's entire account! https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-cloud-acciden...

flumpcakes2• 9 months ago

Pretty much all Azure services seem to be down. Their status page says it's only the portal since 16:00. It would be nice if these mega-companies could update their status page when they take down a large fraction of the Internet and thousands of services that use them.

kierenj4• 9 months ago

FWIW, all of our databases, VMs, AKS clusters, services, jobs etc - are all working fine. Which services are down for you, maybe we can build a list?

reknih• 9 months ago

Front Door is down for us (as Azure‘s Twitter account confirms)

parliament325• 9 months ago

All of our Azure workloads are up, but we don't use Azure Front Door. That seems to be the only impacted product, apart from the management portal.

flumpcakes2• 9 months ago

We're using Application Gateway for ingress, that seems to be effected.

jayw_lead• 9 months ago

Same playbook for AWS. When they admitted that Dynamo was inaccessible, they failed to provide context that their internal services are heavily dependent on Dynamo

It's only after the fact they are transparent about the impact

wbsun• 9 months ago

Does their status page depend on something that is down already, so the page just fails static now hence no new updates?

vpears87• 9 months ago

At least MSFT is consistent: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ is down as well

CommanderData• 9 months ago

Likely behind Azure Front Door.

Much of Xbox is behind that too.

dlcarrier2• 9 months ago

We're quickly learning who's relying on a single cloud provider.

shagie• 9 months ago

Like AWS or GCP? https://downdetector.com/status/aws-amazon-web-services/ - https://downdetector.com/status/google-cloud/

MiguelHudnandez• 9 months ago

When you look at the scale of the reports, you find they are much lower than Azure's. seeing a bunch of 24-hour sparkline type graphs next to each other can make it look like they are equally impacted, but AWS has 500 reports and Azure has 20,000. The scale is hidden by the choice of graph.

In other words, people reporting outages at AWS are probably having trouble with microsoft-run DNS services or caching proxies. It's not that the issues aren't there, it's that the internet is full of intermingled complexity. Just that amount of organic false-positives can make it look like an unrelated major service is impacted.

Insanity4• 9 months ago

Multi cloud is really hard to get right at scale, and honestly not worth the effort for the majority of companies and use-case.

macshome• 9 months ago

I just tried to check the Xbox services status page and it never even loaded.

chokolad• 9 months ago

Majority of actual Xbox services are working fine, xbox.com itself is busted.

Jarwain2• 9 months ago

On our end, our VMs are still working, so our gitlab instance is still up. Our services using Azure App Services are available through their provided url. However, Front Door is failing to resolve any domains that it was responsible for.

ThatManulTheCat4• 9 months ago

Yudkowsky's feared Superintellignece holding Azure hostage

LaserToy• 9 months ago

Azure portal still insists the issue is jsut with Console.

We had to bypass the Frontdoor

ksec• 9 months ago

Last week AWS, now this.

This is not the first or second time this happened, multiple Hyperscaler failed one by one.

cbovis• 9 months ago

Looks to be affecting our pipelines that rely on Playwright as they download images from Azure e.g. https://playwright.azureedge.net/builds/chromium/1124/chromi... which aren't currently resolving.

kierenj4• 9 months ago

microsoft.com is back -

edit: it worked once, then died again. So I guess - some resolvers, or FD servers may be working!

speckx2• 9 months ago

FYI: https://status.cloud.microsoft/

Boxersteavee• 9 months ago

503 Service Unavailable

speckx2• 9 months ago

FYI: https://status.cloud.microsoft/

chuckadams• 9 months ago

Which itself is^H^H was down. Wow.

jacquesm• 9 months ago

It is much more than azure. One of my kids needs a key for their laptop and can't reach that either. Great excuse though, 'Azure ate my homework'. What a ridiculous world we are building. Fuck MS and their account requirements for windows.

improbableinf2• 9 months ago

What a time to be alive!

thimkerbell• 9 months ago

Does (should, could) DownDetector also say what customer-facing services are down, when some infrastructure is unworking? Or is that the info that the malefactors are seeking?

improbableinf2• 9 months ago

According to downtector.com - both AWS and GCP are down as well. Interesting

jasonjmcghee• 9 months ago

Don't visit this address.

bernardo786• 9 months ago

now aws down again?

pred8er3• 9 months ago

things seem to be coming back up now

MangoCoffee2• 9 months ago

The Internet is supposed to be decentralized. The big three seem to have all the power now (Amazon, Microsoft, and Google) plus Cloudflare/Oracle.

How did we get here? Is it because of scale? Going to market in minutes by using someone else's computers instead of building out your own, like co-location or dedicated servers, like back in the day.

kube-system• 9 months ago

It still is very decentralized. We are discussing this via the internet right now.

Mr_Bees696• 9 months ago

Yeah, but MyChart is down.

acedTrex• 9 months ago

big, if true

kbelder• 9 months ago

I need to drop AWS and start passing data through encrypted HN posts.

chasd005• 9 months ago

When AWS was down we were talking about it here, now Azure is down and we're still talking about it here. Where does HN actually live?

alt2279• 9 months ago

Thats the whole point, big players like AWS and MS can go down, but here we are still talking on the internet.

Decentralisation is winning it seems.

jslaby• 9 months ago

Not everyone has moved over, but I'm sure there have been thoughts or plans to.

mrinterweb• 9 months ago

A lot of money and years of marketing the cloud as the responsible business decision led us here. Now that the cloud providers have vendor lock-in, few will leave, and customers will continue to wildly overpay for cloud services.

gwbas1c5• 9 months ago

Ahh, but you forget what it used to be like. Sites used to go down all the time.

Now, they go down a lot less frequently, but when they do, it's more widespread.

pphysch• 9 months ago

Consolidation is the inevitable outcome of free unregulated markets.

In our highly interconnected world, decentralization paradoxically requires a central authority to enforce decentralization by restricting M&A, cartels, etc.

SoKamil• 9 months ago

Is there a theorem that models this behavior? Capital feels like a mass that attracts more mass the larger it becomes, like gravity.

nzach• 9 months ago

How did we get here?

I think the response lies in the surrounding ecosystem.

If you have a company it's easier to scale your team if you use AWS (or any other established ecosystem). It's way easier to hire 10 engineers that are competent with AWS tools than it is to hire 10 engineers that are competent with the IBM tools.

And from the individuals perspective it also make sense to bet on larger platforms. If you want to increase your odds of getting a new job, learning the AWS tools gives you a better ROI than learning the IBM tools.

SecretDreams• 9 months ago

How did we get here?

Stonks

AndrewKemendo• 9 months ago

A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which high infrastructure costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors. Specifically, an industry is a natural monopoly if a single firm can supply the entire market at a lower long-run average cost than if multiple firms were to operate within it. In that case, it is very probable that a company (monopoly) or a minimal number of companies (oligopoly) will form, providing all or most of the relevant products and/or services.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

anonymars• 9 months ago

Efficiency (aka cost) <---> Resiliency/redundancy

Pick your point on the scale

deathanatos• 9 months ago

Maybe in a perfect world, or in a free market.

But the cloud compute market is basically centralized into 2.5 companies at this point. The point of paying companies like Azure here is that they've in theory centralized the knowledge and know-how of running multiple, distributed datacenters, so as to be resilient.

But that we keep seeing outages encompassing more than a failure domain, then it should be fair game for engineers / customers to ask "what am I paying for, again?"

Moreover, this seems to be a classic case of large barriers to entry (the huge capital costs associated with building out a datacenter) barring new entrants into the market, coupled with "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" level thinking. Are outages like these truly factored into the napkin math that says externalizing this is worth it?

codethief2• 9 months ago

Meredith Whittaker (of Signal) addressed your question the other day: https://mastodon.world/@Mer__edith/115445701583902092

deaux• 9 months ago

From today [0].

Big Tech lobbying is riding the EU’s deregulation wave by spending more, hiring more, and pushing more, according to a new report by NGO’s Corporate Europe Observatory and LobbyControl on Wednesday (29 October).
Based on data from the EU’s transparency register, the NGOs found that tech companies spend the most on lobbying of any sector, spending €151m a year on lobbying — a 33 percent increase from €113m in 2023.

Gee whizz, I really do wonder how they end up having all the power!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45744973

AdmiralAsshat• 9 months ago

Some exec at Microsoft told the Azure guys to ape everything Amazon does and they took it literally.

dboreham• 9 months ago

This is funny but also possibly true because: business/MBA types see these outages as a way to prove how critical some services are, leading to investors deciding to load up on the vendor's stock.

alt2279• 9 months ago

I may or may not have been known to temporarily take a database down in the past to make a point to management about how unreliable some old software is.

Telemakhos• 9 months ago

Or, the NSA needed to upgrade their access at both.

embedding-shape2• 9 months ago

Do Microsoft still say "If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data, we don't participate in it" today (which PRISM proved very false), or are they at least acknowledging they're participating in whatever NSA has deployed today?

jrochkind1• 9 months ago

I was gonna say that obv AWS hacked em to even things up.

almosthere• 9 months ago

Reports of Azure and AWS down on the same day? Infrastructure terrorism?

reaperducer4• 9 months ago

Reports of Azure and AWS down on the same day? Infrastructure terrorism?

We have confirmed that an inadvertent configuration change as the trigger event for this issue.

Save the speculation for Reddit. HN is better than that.

12_throw_away3• 9 months ago

Infrastructure terrorism?

Unless that's a euphemism for "vibe coding", no.

vachina2• 9 months ago

microsoft.com and some subdomains (answers.microsoft.com) has no A and AAA records. They screwed up big time.

https://archive.is/Q4izZ

0xbadcafebee2• 9 months ago

That specific subdomain has issues with propagation: https://dnschecker.org/#A/answers.microsoft.com (only four resolvers return records)

The root zone and www. do not: https://dnschecker.org/#A/microsoft.com (all resolvers return records)

And querying https://www.microsoft.com/ results in HTTP 200 on the root document, but the page elements return errors (a 504 on the .css/.js documents, a 404 on some fonts, Name Not Resolved on scripts.clarity.ms, Connection Timed Out on wcpstatic.microsoft.com and mem.gfx.ms). That many different kinds of errors is actually kind of impressive.

I'm gonna say this was a networking/routing issue. The CDN stayed up, but everything else non-CDN became unroutable, and different requests traveled through different paths/services, but each eventually hit the bad network path, and that's what created all the different responses. Could also have been a bad deploy or a service stopped running and there's different things trying to access that service in different ways, leading to the weird responses... but that wouldn't explain the failed DNS propagation.

Aperocky4• 9 months ago

wow, right after AWS suffered a similar thing.

I wonder if this is microsoft "learning" to "prevent" such an issue and instead triggered it...

"One often meets his destiny on the path he takes to avoid it" -- Master Oogway

zelias• 9 months ago

Anyone have betting odds on when Google will go down next? Are we looking at all 3 providers having outages in the span of 3 weeks?

pred8er3• 9 months ago

looks like MS completed a failover and things are be recovering slowly

Mr_Bees696• 9 months ago

MS website seems to be up but really slow. Think xbox might still be down, Bing works for some reason tho!?

opengrass• 9 months ago

Github Actions and Codespaces degraded.

tecleandor• 9 months ago

LinkedIn has been acting funny for an hour or so, and some pages in the learn.microsoft.com domain have been failing for me too...

philipallstar2• 9 months ago

Can't get to microsoft.com even.

gianpaj• 9 months ago

Can't download VSCode :D

Error: visual-studio-code: Download failed on Cask 'visual-studio-code' with message: Download failed: https://update.code.visualstudio.com/1.105.1/darwin-arm64/st...

robotnikman2• 9 months ago

Also cant do anything right now with the repo's we have in Azure Devops, how lovely...

loopduplicate• 9 months ago

get vscodium then

progmetaldev7• 9 months ago

I have had intermittent issues with winget today. I use UniGetUI for a front-end, and anything tied to Microsoft has failed for me. Judging by the logs, it's mostly retrieving the listing of versions (I assume similar to what 'apt-get update' does, I'm fairly new to using winget for Windows package management).

ApolloFortyNine2• 9 months ago

They admit in their update blurb azure front door is having issues but still report azure front door as having no issues on their status page.

And it's very clear from these updates that they're more focused on the portal than the product, their updates haven't even mentioned fixing it yet, just moving off of it, as if it's some third party service that's down.

consp2• 9 months ago

as having no issues on their status page

Unsubstantiated idea: So the support contract likely says there is a window between each reporting step and the status page is the last one and the one in the legal documents giving them several more hours before the clauses trigger.

empath75• 9 months ago

Friend of mine at MSFT says it's a Sev-0 outage and they can't even get to the ticket tracking system.

jimmyl02• 9 months ago

pretty interesting how datadog's uptime tracker (https://updog.ai/) says all the sites are fully available.

if that's true then it's a sign that Azure's control / data plane separation is doing it's job! at least for now

jonathanlydall3• 9 months ago

Our Azure hosted dotnet App Service is working fine, but our docs site served via Front Door went down. Can’t access anything through the Portal.

layer82• 9 months ago

Maybe they need a downtime tracker. ;)

syntaxing• 9 months ago

I absolutely love the utility aspect of LLMs but part of me is curious if moving faster by using AI is going to make these sorts of failure more and more often.

monkaiju• 9 months ago

If true then what "utility" is there?

1718627440• 9 months ago

More visibility for the general person to see how brittle software is?

givemeethekeys• 9 months ago

Surely more vibecoding will fix this problem. Time to fire more staff

agency• 9 months ago

So that's why I can't check in for my Alaska Airlines flight... https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/digital-transform...

kurttheviking• 9 months ago

I am unable to load this article...presumably for related reasons

Shuddown2• 9 months ago

Pretty much every single Microsoft domain I've tried to access loads for a looooong time before giving me some bare html. I wonder if someone can explain why that's happening.

sodafountan• 9 months ago

I was wondering the same thing

MangoCoffee2• 9 months ago

"BREAKING: Alaska Airlines' website, app impacted amid Microsoft Azure outage"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJVkLP57yvM

okokwhatever• 9 months ago

This cannot be a coincidence

hypeatei3• 9 months ago

All of my employers things are hosted on Azure and running just fine and didn't go down at all. Portal access has been fixed.

Doesn't seem to be too bad of an outage unless you were relying on Azure Front Door.

randomsofr• 9 months ago

SSO is down, Azure Portal Down and more, seems like a major outage. Already a lot of services seem to be affected: banks, airlines, consumer apps, etc.

hypeatei3• 9 months ago

The portal is up for me and their status page confirms they did a failover for it. Definitely not disputing that its reach is wide, but a lot of smaller setups probably aren't using Front Door.

rahkiin• 9 months ago

Both work for me in the Netherlands

gmassman• 9 months ago

I’ve been migrating our services off of Azure slowly for the past couple of years. The last internet facing things remaining are a static assets bucket and an analytics VM running Matomo. Working with Front Door has been an abysmal experience, and today was the push I needed to finally migrate our assets to Cloudflare.

I feel pretty justified in my previous decisions to move away from Azure. Using it feels like building on quicksand…

alt2279• 9 months ago

All the clouds hav had major outages this year.

At this point I dont believe that any one of them is any better or reliable than the others.

btmiller• 9 months ago

Never let a good disaster go to waste ;)

not_a_bot_4sho2• 9 months ago

I feel pretty justified in my previous decisions to move away from Azure

I felt this way about AWS last week

amluto• 9 months ago

vscode.dev appears to be down. I think this will be my excuse to find an alternative -- I never really liked vscode.dev anyway.

(Coder is currently at the top of the experiment list. Any other suggestions?)

wingless_angel• 9 months ago

Please sort it out, I'll be out of a job tomorrow.

I_am_tiberius2• 9 months ago

Shouldn't regions be completely independent?

glzone12• 9 months ago

Wasn't the saying "It's always DNS" floating around somewhere?

Be interesting to understand cause here. Pretty big impact on services we use

mikestew• 9 months ago

Could be DNS, I'm seeing SERVFAIL trying to resolve what look to be MS servers when I'm hitting (just one example) mygoodtogo.com (trying to pay a road toll bill, and failing).

glzone12• 9 months ago

I remember the saying "It's always DNS". I'm old.

Kind of mindboggling it's still sometimes DNS maybe.

alt2279• 9 months ago

That saying is just as alive today as it ever was.

https://isitdns.com/

0000000000100• 9 months ago

Yeah just took down the prod site for one of our clients since we host the front-end out of their CDN. Just got wrapped up panic hosting it somewhere else for the past hour, very quickly reminds you about the pain of cookies...

alt2279• 9 months ago

... and DNS caching, and browser file cache, and sessions...

Moving a website quickly is never fun.

anon025• 9 months ago

It's the DNS https://dnschecker.org/#A/get.helm.sh is unreachable

I_am_tiberius2• 9 months ago

Why are Azure App Services still working?

howard941• 9 months ago

Took out the archive.ph and .is sites too?

LouisLazaris• 9 months ago

The VS Code website is down: https://code.visualstudio.com/

And so is Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/

codethief2• 9 months ago

https://www.microsoft.com works for me (with the www subdomain).

bossyTeacher4• 9 months ago

I noticed issues on Azure so I went to the status page. It said everything was fine even though the Azure Portal was down. It took more than 10 minutes for that status page to update.

How can one of the richest companies in the world not offer a better service?

Ylpertnodi• 9 months ago

How can one of the richest companies in the world not offer a better service?

Better service costs money.

everfrustrated2• 9 months ago

GitHub runners (specifically the "larger" runner types) are all down for us. These are known to be hosted on Azure.

pred8er3• 9 months ago

on the line with msft, they said 4 hours is what they are thinking. a workaround they are saying is to use traffic manager,

zzake• 9 months ago

Portal is now accessible, bypassing FDN

ApolloFortyNine2• 9 months ago

Two hours after the initial outage, they have finally updated the Front Door status on their status page.

port113• 9 months ago

So much of Belgium runs on Azure… it's honestly baffling how many services are down, there's no resilience built into (even large) companies anymore.

move-on-by• 9 months ago

Instead of cyber security awareness month, we should rename it to cloud availability awareness month.

martijnvds• 9 months ago

This probably explains why paying for street parking in Cologne by phone/web didn't work (eternal spinner) then

ukblewis2• 9 months ago

GitHub also seems to be having trouble for me

jacquesclouseau• 9 months ago

My bet is on a bad config change.

croemer5• 9 months ago

They already announced that.

hedayet• 9 months ago

The sad thing is - $MSFT isn't even down by 1%. And IIRC, $AMZN actually went up during their previous outage.

So if we look at these companies' bottom lines, all those big wigs are actually doing something right. Sales and lobbying capacity is way more effective than reliability or good engineering (at least in the short term).

navane• 9 months ago

Look how important we are, is what these failures show

marcosdumay• 9 months ago

What do you mean? That IT isn't important for Microsoft and Amazon?

That's certainly not the right conclusion.

cyberax3• 9 months ago

So we can look forward to "accidental" cloud outages just to show their importance?

I guess the GCP is next.

Arrath• 9 months ago

"They'll learn their lesson and be rock solid after this! I better invest now!"

locusofself• 9 months ago

AMZN went up almost 4 percent between the day of the outage and the day after. Crazy market.

jlarocco• 9 months ago

Because it shows how much lock-in they have.

You know nobody is migrating off of AWS or Azure because of these.

AtNightWeCode3• 9 months ago

I looked into this before and the stocks of these large corps simply does not move when outages happens. Maybe intra-day, I don't have that data, but in general no effect.

iamtheworstdev• 9 months ago

well, at this point, 90% of the market cap of FAANGS plus Microsoft is... OMG AI LLM hype

bigstrat2003• 9 months ago

That's a good thing. Stock prices shouldn't go down because of rare incidents which don't accurately represent how successful a company is likely to be in the future.

rsolva• 9 months ago

So that's why all of our municipality's digital services are down ... utter chaos at the political meeting I attended just now.

irusensei• 9 months ago

I was working when I saw the portal page showing only resource groups and lots of items missing. I thought it was a weird browser cache issue.

The actual stuff I was working on (App Insights, Function App) that was still open was operational.

AtNightWeCode3• 9 months ago

Earnings report today. A coincidence?

I can at least login to Azure. But several MS sites are down.

tonyhart7• 9 months ago

Wtf happen with US east????

bob10292• 9 months ago

For some reason an Azure outage does not faze me in the same way that an AWS outage does.

I have never had much confidence in Azure as a cloud provider. The vertical integration of all the things for a Microsoft shop was initially very compelling. I was ready to fight that battle. But, this fantasy was quickly ruined by poor execution on Microsoft's part. They were able to convince me to move back to AWS by simply making it difficult to provision compute resources. Their quota system & availability issues are a nightmare to deal with compared to EC2.

At this point I'd rather use GCP over Azure and I have zero seconds of experience with it. The number of things Microsoft gets right in 2025 can be counted single-handedly. The things they do get right are quite good, but everything else tends to be extremely awful.

redwood2• 9 months ago

I read "Microsoft shop" as "Microsoft slop". Fitting. But at least they open source wash themselves so much they're practically a charity right?

xmcp123• 9 months ago

Many years back was the first time I used Azure, evaluating it for a client.

I remember I at one point had expanded enough menus that it covered the entirety of the screen.

Never before have I felt so lost in a cloud product.

WorldMaker4• 9 months ago

The "Blades" experience [0] where instead of navigating between pages it just kept opening things to the side and expanding horizontally?

Yeah, that had some fun ideas but was way more confusing than it needed to be. But also that was quite a few years back now. The Portal ditched that experience relatively quickly. Just long enough to leave a lot of awful first impressions, but not long enough for it to be much more than a distant memory at this point, several redesigns later.

[0] The name "Blades" for that came from the early years of the Xbox 360, maybe not the best UX to emulate for a complex control panel/portal.

nazgulsenpai• 9 months ago

Count your blessings. You could have to use Azure SSO through Oracle Cloud..... ; ;

lovich• 9 months ago

I found it intuitive but admittedly it felt a lot like their Xbox UI which I used a lot during my formative years

jeffrallen5• 9 months ago

Amazon: here's two buttons, some check boxes and a random popup.

MSFT : Hold my beer...

foresterre4• 9 months ago

AWS' UI is similarly messy, and to this day. They regularly remove useful data from the UI, or change stuff like the default sort order of database snapshots from last created to initial instance created date.

I never understood why a clear and consistent UI and improved UX isn't more of a priority for the big three cloud providers. Even though you talk mostly via platform SDK's, I would consider better UI especially initially, a good way to bind new customers and pick your platform over others.

I guess with their bottom line they don't need it (or cynically, you don't want to learn and invest in another cloud if you did it once).

aftbit2• 9 months ago

The problem is that in some industries, Microsoft is the only option. Many of these regulated industries are just now transitioning from the data center to the cloud, and they've barely managed to get approval for that with all of the Microsoft history in their organization. AWS or GCloud are complete non-starters.

bob10292• 9 months ago

I moved a 100% MS shop to AWS circa 2015. We ran our DCs on EC2 instances just as if they were on prem. At some point we installed the AAD connector and bridged some stuff to Azure for office/mail/etc., but it was all effectively in AWS. We were selling software to banks so we had a lot of due diligence to suffer. AWS Artifact did much of the heavy lifting for us. We started with Amazon's compliance documentation and provided our own feedback on top where needed.

I feel like compliance is the entire point of using these cloud providers. You get a huge head start. Maintaining something like PCI-DSS when you own the real estate is a much bigger headache than if it's hosted in a provider who is already compliant up through the physical/hardware/networking layers. Getting application-layer checkboxes ticked off is trivial compared to "oops we forgot to hire an armed security team". I just took a look and there are currently 316 certifications and attestations listed under my account.

https://aws.amazon.com/artifact/faq/

arccy2• 9 months ago

The only reason you'd notice MS was down was if Github was down....

foresterre4• 9 months ago

GitHub doesn't use Azure yet, but has just published their migration path to azure a few days ago.

I would link to that article, but that one does seem down ;)

abhinavk• 9 months ago

I only noticed it because VSCode's updater failed.

otterdude2• 9 months ago

What Amazon, Azure, and Google are showing with their platform crashes amid layoffs, while they supports governments that are Oppressing's Citizens and Ignoring the Law, is that they do not care about anything other than the bottom line.

They think they have the market captured, but I think what their dwindling quality and ethics are really going to drive is adoption of self hosting, distributed computing frameworks. Nerds are the ones who drove adoption of these platforms, and we can eventually end if we put in the work.

Seriously with container technology, and a bit more work / adoption on distributed compute systems and file storage (IPFS,FileCoin) there is a future where we dont have to use big brothers compute platform. Fuck these guys.

WD-422• 9 months ago

Preach

lazystar• 9 months ago

they do not care about anything other than the bottom line.

if all companies focused on fixing each and every social issue that exists in the world, how would they make any money?

amnesty6249• 9 months ago

These were my thoughts exactly. I may have my tinfoil hat on, but outages these close together between the largest cloud providers amid social unrest, my wonder is the government / tech companies implementing some update that adds additional spyware / blackout functionality.

I really hope this pushes the internet back to how it used to be, self hosted, privacy, anonymity. I truly hope that's where we're headed, but the masses seem to just want to stay comfortable as long as their show is on TV

danielovichdk• 9 months ago

What did you do when AWS was down last week?

WD-422• 9 months ago

Azure outages don’t faze anyone because nobody notices when it happens.

multiplegeorges• 9 months ago

At this point I'd rather use GCP over Azure and I have zero seconds of experience with it.

TBH, GCP is very good! More people should use it.

bpye• 9 months ago

I haven't used much of GCP, but I have had a good experience with Cloud Run and really haven't found a comparable offering from the other clouds.

macintux2• 9 months ago

I know for some people the prospect of losing their Google Cloud access due to an automated terms of service violation on some completely unrelated service is worrisome.

https://cloud.google.com/resource-manager/docs/project-suspe...

I'd hope you can create a Google Cloud account under a completely different email address, but I do as little business with Google as I can get away with, so I have no idea.

archon810• 9 months ago

I've used AWS, Azure, and recently GCP. You do NOT want to use GCP.
TBH, GCP is very good! More people should use it.

These takes couldn't be further apart. Gotta love HN comments.

the_black_hand2• 9 months ago

have used both. I prefer Azure. Much easier to use. found GCP unintuitive.

Nemo_bis• 9 months ago

Microsoft is better at regulatory capture, so Azure has many customers in the public sector. So an Azure outage probably affects the public sector more (see example above about trains).

karel-3d• 9 months ago

Microsoft has the regulatory capture. All the European privacy and regulatory laws are good for Azure. That's why your average European government or baking app runs most likely on Azure. (or Oracle, but more likely Azure)

issafram• 9 months ago

I've used AWS, Azure, and recently GCP. You do NOT want to use GCP.

major5052• 9 months ago

I like azure. I think they are more intuitive tua aws and good, and they have good prices for startups ( essentially free for a whole year )

AtNightWeCode3• 9 months ago

From Azure status page: "Customers can consider implementing failover strategies with Azure Traffic Manager, to fail over from Azure Front Door to your origins".

What a terrible advise.

amir734jj• 9 months ago

It's DNS

worik• 9 months ago

An important quality of the cloud is that it is always available.

Except that it is not!

Interesting times...

btbuildem2• 9 months ago

https://login.microsoftonline.com/ is down, so that's fun

basfo2• 9 months ago

We’re 100% on Azure but so far there’s no impact for us.

Luckily, we moved off Azure Front Door about a year ago. We’d had three major incidents tied to Front Door and stopped treating it as a reliable CDN.

They weren’t global outages, more like issues triggered by new deployments. In one case, our homepage suddenly showed a huge Microsoft banner about a “post-quantum encryption algorithm” or something along those lines.

Kinda wild that a company that big can be so shaky on a CDN, which should be rock solid.

Aperocky4• 9 months ago

Outages are one thing, but having your content polluted seems like a more serious problem? Unless you subscribed to microsoft banners somehow.

basfo2• 9 months ago

And it was HUGE, the microsoft logo was like 50% of the screen.

qiller• 9 months ago

We battled https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/1331370/... for over a year, and finally decided to move off since there was no any resolution. Unfortunately our API servers were still behind AFD so they were affected by today's stuff...

perks_12• 9 months ago

Thank you. I was wondering what was going on at a company whose web app I need to access. I just checked with BuiltWith and it seems they are on Azure.

redwood2• 9 months ago

Is it Cosmos DB? If so the symmetry with AWS/Dynamo would be very eerie.

chrisgeleven• 9 months ago

"Front Door" has to be the worst product name for a CDN I've ever heard of. I used to work for a CDN too.

unethical_ban• 9 months ago

I wonder if many Germans are eager to sign up for AFD.

But seriously I thought it would be the console, not a CDN.

jeffrallen5• 9 months ago

Front Door (tm), with Back Door access for the FBI included free with your subscription! ;)

oliyoung• 9 months ago

We should've never let marketing in the door honestly, all of the product names for the big three are awful.

Microsoft CDN

There, that's it. You're selling it to (hopefully) technical people

joquarky• 9 months ago

It so strongly implies a counterpart.

montague27• 9 months ago

Guess when/who has the next outage!

mattdecker100• 9 months ago

Unable to use Ona's GitPod through VSCode SSH - Unable to download code server from https://update.code.visualstudio.com

smithkl42• 9 months ago

The iron law of uptime: "The mandatory single point of failure in every possible system is configuration."

aftbit2• 9 months ago

I still can't log into Azure Gov Cloud with

https://microsoft.com/deviceloginus

Seems like they migrated the non-Gov login but not the Gov one. C'mon Microsoft, I've got a deadline in a few days.

alt2279• 9 months ago

Microsoft have started putting customer status pages up on windows.net, so it must be really really bad!

For example when I try to log into our payroll provider Brightpay, it sends me here:

https://bpuk1prod1environment.blob.core.windows.net/host-pro...

qmr• 9 months ago

Always in these large provider outages you see people who have forgotten the old ways.

udev4096• 9 months ago

Luckily, no one uses azure and it's fully expected from azure to go down all the time! Keep it up!

CKMo• 9 months ago

Reasons to not use hyperscalers, exhibit 654

There's a lot of outages this month!

Imustaskforhelp2• 9 months ago

Google cloud run or cloudflare workers it is.

Personally I am thinking more and more about hetzner, yes I know its not an apples to orange comparison. But its honestly so good

Someone had created a video where they showed the underlying hardware etc., I am wondering if there is something like https://vpspricetracker.com/ but with geek-benchmarks as well.

This video was affiliated with scalahosting but still I don't think that there was too much bias of them and they showed at around 3:37 a graph comparison with prices https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dvuBH2Pc1g

Now it shows how contabo has better hardware but I am pretty sure that there might be some other issues, and honestly I feel a sense of trust with hetzner I am not sure about others.

Either hetzner or self hosting stuff personally or just having a very cheap vps and going to hetzner if need be but hetzner already is pretty cheap or I might use some free service that I know of are good as well.

TiredOfLife• 9 months ago

One of recent (4 months ago) Cloudflare outages (I think it was even workers) was caused by Google Cloud being down and Cloudflare hosting an essential service there

kentonv• 9 months ago

It was Workers KV (an optional storage add-on to Workers), and we fixed it, it no longer depends on GCP:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/rearchitecting-workers-kv-for-re...

Imustaskforhelp2• 9 months ago

Hm it seemed that they hosted a critical service for cloudflare kv on google itself, but I wonder about the update.

Personally I just trust cloudflare more than google, given how their focus is on security whereas google feels googly...

I have heard some good things about google cloud run and the google's interface feels the best out of AWS,Azure,GCloud but I still would just prefer cloudflare/hetzner iirc

Another question: Has there ever been a list of all major cloud outages, like I am interested how many times google cloud and all cloud providers went majorly down I guess y'know? is there a website/git project that tracks this?

hshdhdhehd7• 9 months ago

Are you after nines? Maybe do multi provider?

Havoc2• 9 months ago

Hetzner seems sound, but I doubt they play in the same reliability league as google

dijit3• 9 months ago

Probably not, but at least you don’t delude yourself into thinking reliability is a solved problem just because you’re paying through the nose for compute and storage.

sedatk• 9 months ago

The paradox of cloud provider crashes is that if the provider goes down and takes the whole world with it, it's actually good advertisement. Because, that means so many things rely on it, it's critically important, and has so many big customers. That might be why Amazon stock went up after AWS crash.

If Azure goes down and nobody feels it, does Azure really matter?

thewebguyd2• 9 months ago

People feel it, but usually not general consumers like they do when AWS goes down.

If Azure goes down, it's mostly affecting internal stuff at big old enterprises. Jane in accounting might notice, but the customers don't. Contrast with AWS which runs most of the world's SaaS products.

People not being able to do their jobs internally for a day tends not to make headlines like "100 popular internet services down for everyone" does.

whalesalad• 9 months ago

Yikes, http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/ is running on Azure and it's down. So any SOAP/WSDL api's are dead in the water.

    HTTPSConnectionPool(host='schemas.xmlsoap.org', port=443): Max retries exceeded with url: /soap/encoding/ (Caused by SSLError(CertificateError("hostname 'schemas.xmlsoap.org' doesn't match '*.azureedge.net'")))

A service we rely on that isn't even running on Azure is inaccessible due to this issue. For an asset that probably never changes. Wild for that to be the SPOF.

160k+ results on GitHub: https://github.com/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fschemas.xmlsoap.org...

delf• 9 months ago

The outage impacted GitSocial minor version bump release: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GitSocia...

There's no way to tell, and after about 30 minutes, the release process on VS Code Marketplace failed with a cryptic message: "Repository signing for extension file failed.". And there's no way to restart/resume it.

zingababba• 9 months ago

This brings to mind this -> https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-a...

amaccuish• 9 months ago

Seeing users having issues with the "Modern Outlook", specifically empty accounts. Switching back to the "Legacy Outlook" which functions largely without the help of the cloud fixes the issue. How ironic.

_andrei_• 9 months ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1ojbebq/...

user39393822• 9 months ago

I know how to fix this but this community is too close minded and argumentative egocentric sensitive pedantic threatened angry etc to bother discussing it

ycombinator_acc• 9 months ago

Aww man you got me curious for a sec there.

user39393822• 9 months ago

I’ll roll it out

tpl• 9 months ago

Part of this outage involves outlook hanging and then blaming random addins. Pretty terrible practice by Microsoft to blame random vendors for their own outage.

foresterre4• 9 months ago

It still surprises me how much essential services like public transport are completely reliant on cloud providers, and don't seem to have backups in place.

Here in The Netherlands, almost all trains were first delayed significantly, and then cancelled for a few hours because of this, which had real impact because today is also the day we got to vote for the next parlement (I know some who can't get home in time before the polls close, and they left for work before they opened).

conductr7• 9 months ago

Is voting there a one day only event? If not, I feel the solution to that particular problem is quite clear. There’s a million things that could go wrong causing you to miss something when you try to do it in a narrow time range (today after work before polls close)

If it’s a multi day event, it’s probably that way for a reason. Partially the same as the solution to above.

klardotsh• 9 months ago

Washington State having full vote-by-mail (there is technically a layer of in-person voting as a fallback for those who need it for accessibility reasons or who missed the registration deadline) has spoiled me rotten, I couldn't imagine having to go back to synchronous on-site voting on a single day like I did in Illinois. Awful. Being able to fill my ballot at my leisure, at home, where I can have all the research material open, and drive it to a ballot drop box whenever is convenient in a 2-3 week window before 20:00 on election night, is a game-changer for democracy. Of course this also means that people who serve to benefit from disenfranchising voters and making it more difficult to vote, absolutely hate our system and continually attack it for one reason or another.

DontBreakAlex• 9 months ago

In europe, voting typically happens in one day, where everyone physically goes to their designated voting place and puts papers in a transparent box. You can stay there and wait for the count at the end of the day if you want to. Tom Scott has a very good video about why we don't want electronic/mail voting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI

mc32• 9 months ago

If India can have voters vote and tally all the votes in one day, then so can everyone else. It’s the best way to avoid fraud and people going with whoever is ahead. I am sympathetic with emergency protocols for deadly pandemics, but for all else, in-person on a given day.

barrenko2• 9 months ago

wouldn't put China or Russia above this

gowld2• 9 months ago

Why would you put Microsoft above this?

platevoltage2• 9 months ago

I wouldn't put Texas above this either.

alt2279• 9 months ago

Wow thats crazy! National transport infrastructure being so fragile. What a great age we live in.

onionisafruit4• 9 months ago

It is a great age to live in where we have transportation infrastructure beyond foot paths.

hinkley14• 9 months ago

Voting days should be a national holiday.

Archelaos• 9 months ago

In Germany it is always a Sunday.

tmtvl2• 9 months ago

Here in Belgium voting is usually done during the weekend, although it shouldn't matter because voting is a civic duty (unless you have a good reason you have to go vote or you'll be fined), so those who work during the weekend have a valid reason to come in late or leave early.

hshdhdhehd7• 9 months ago

In Australia there are so many places to vote, it is almost popping out to get milk level if convenience. Just detour your dog walk slightly. Always at the weekend.

hshdhdhehd7• 9 months ago

In Australia there are so many places to vote, it is almost popping out to get milk level if convenience. (At least in urbia and suburbia) Just detour your dog walk slightly. Always at the weekend.

sleepybrett• 9 months ago

In washington we have a 100% mail-in voting system (for all intents and purposes). I can put my ballot back in the mail or drop at any number of drop-boxes throughout the city (less dropboxes in rural areas i'm sure). I think there are some allowances for in-person voting but I don't think they are often used.

There is a ballot tracking system as well, I can see and be notified as my ballot moves through the counting system. It's pretty cool.

I actually just got back from dropping off my local elections ballot 15m ago, quick bike trip maybe a mile or so away and back.

Of course, because it makes it easy for people to vote, the republicans want to do away with it. If you have to stand in line for several hours (which seems to be very normal in most cities) and potentially miss work to do it that's going to all but guarantee that working people and the less motivated will not vote.

So yes in places that only do in person voting, national or state holiday.

j452• 9 months ago

Organizations who had their own datacenters were chided for being resistant to modernizing, and now they modernized to use someone else's shared computers and they stopped working.

I really do feel the only viable future for clouds is hybrid or agnostic clouds.

esseph4• 9 months ago

Hybrid was always the way. Use different tools to solve different problems.

tmtvl2• 9 months ago

The Flemish bus company (de Lijn) uses Azure and I couldn't activate my ticket when I came home after training a couple of hours ago. I should probably start using physical tickets again, because at least those work properly. It's just stupid that there's so much stuff being moved to digital only (often even only being accessible through an Android or iOS app, despite the parent companies of those two being utterly atrocious) when the physical alternatives are more reliable.

stefs• 9 months ago

i'm not sure this is an easily solvable problem. i remember reading an article arguing that your cloud provider is part of your tech stack and it's close to impossible/a huge PITA to make a non-trivial service provider-agnostic. they'd have to run their own openstack in different datacenters, which would be costly and have their own points of failure.

myself248• 9 months ago

How ever did buses run before The Cloud™? What a weird world that must have been.

dotancohen5• 9 months ago

I run non trivial services on EC2, using that service as a VPS. My deploy script works just as well on provisioned Digital Ocean services and on docker containers using docker-compose.

I do need a human to provision a few servers and configure e.g. load balancing and when to spin up additional servers under load. But that is far less of a PITA than having my systems tied to a specific provider or down whenever a cloud precipitates.

bironran• 9 months ago

Yet... deploy on two clouds and you'll get tax payers scream at you for "wasting money" preparing for a black swan event. Can't have both, either reliability or lower cost.

alliao• 9 months ago

dang even zealand didn't survive! new zealand got some soul searching with this outage which took down government person ID service, it's called RealME and it can be used to file your taxes apply for passport etc

fHr• 9 months ago

can't believe it's 2025 and some still need to go to some place to vote. I can vote since I can remember(at least 20 years) by mail for anything, we also vote multiple times a year(4-6 times), we just get 1 Month before the things to vote by mail and then mail in back votes. Hope we can soon vote online to get rid of the paper overhead.

qrios• 9 months ago

Is that you? The same guy with the comment "hahahhahaha"[1] on "Women dating safety app 'Tea' breached, users' IDs posted to 4chan"[2]?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44689366

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44684373

vanviegen4• 9 months ago

When voting remotely, how can we be sure that your vote was not bought or coerced?

varispeed• 9 months ago

Wasn't cloud sold based on a premise to prevent the very thing that is happening? Sounds like a massive fail of the whole concept.

bethekidyouwant• 9 months ago

You are not getting more 9’s rolling your own

vachina2• 9 months ago

At least I get to control when the 0.01 happens.

bombcar6• 9 months ago

You can get way more 9s if you roll your own procedures - and each step has a way of handling failure of the other steps.

Old trains had paper tickets, the locomotive was its own power source, the conductor had a flashlight, and the conductor could sell tickets for cash.

And if everything else failed, the conductor would just let you ride for free.

Now everything's so interconnected that any one part failing brings everything to a halt.

Mr_Minderbinder• 9 months ago

Finance is increasingly reliant on it too, my bank moved their entire system to AWS. The amount of power being handed over to these cloud companies in exchange for “convenience” is astonishing.

tuukkah2• 9 months ago

Could you provide a reference about the train disruption? I tried but couldn't find anything in English.

foresterre4• 9 months ago

Here is an article in English:

https://nltimes.nl/2025/10/29/ns-hit-microsoft-cloud-outage-...

It should be noted that the article isn't complete: while the travel planner and ticket machines were the first to fail, trains were cancelled soon after; it took a few hours before everything restarted.

Based on what the conductors said, I would speculate that the train drivers digital schedule was not operative, so they didn't know where to go next.

bragma2• 9 months ago

They suggest to use Traffic Manager to route around failing CDNs. But DNS is not working too, making the suggestion another fail.

bragma2• 9 months ago

They suggest to use Traffic Manager to router around failing FrontDoor CDN, but DNS is failing too, making the suggestion another failure.

asciii• 9 months ago

Yeah they're suggesting to use CLI but then my Frontdoor deployment failed. Welp.

rodolphoarruda• 9 months ago

I could not access MS Clarity the entire day.

Shuddown2• 9 months ago

Github Codespaces (for the 5 people that use them) are also still down.

_pdp_• 9 months ago

With all the recent outages considered, it is time to move off the cloud.

seinecle• 9 months ago

Can't connect to Claude

tonymet2• 9 months ago

Hello fellow boomers!

I noticed that winget is also down eg.

  winget upgrade fabric
  Failed in attempting to update the source: winget
  An unexpected error occurred while executing the command:
  InternetOpenUrl() failed.
  0x80072ee7 : unknown error

_oleksandr_• 9 months ago

Based on the delay in resolving the issue, it appears MC attempted to rehire some of the DevOps engineers whom AI had previously replaced.

jeffrallen5• 9 months ago

They probably hired the ones AWS laid off, causing the AWS outage.

Institutional knowledge matters. Just has to be the right institution is all.

m_a_g• 9 months ago

It’s not DNS

There is no way it’s DNS

It was DNS

eeasss• 9 months ago

Deglobalization in geopolitics should be followed by deglobalization in cloud providers as well. Viva la local vendors.

senderista2• 9 months ago

Even if the cloud providers have much better reliability than most on-prem infra, the failure correlation they induce negates much of the benefit.

progmetaldev7• 9 months ago

I was having issues a few hours ago. I'm now able to access the portal, although I get lots of errors in the browser console, and things are loading slowly. I have services in the US-East region.

I have been having issues with GitHub and the winget tool for updates throughout the day as well. I imagine things are pulling from the same locations on Azure for some of the software I needed to update (NPM dependencies, and some .NET tooling).

tonymet2• 9 months ago

Any healthcare IT admins care to chime in? A predominantly MS industry with critical workloads.

acd• 9 months ago

Putting all your eggs software in one basket

zbowling• 9 months ago

Alaska Airlines is redircting folks to their slimmed down international site and you can't check in on mobile.

ycombinatornews• 9 months ago

So that’s why CapitalOne is out today. Even though their (incorrect) status page says all systems operational.

journal• 9 months ago

one day these outages will cause a starvation.

udfalkso• 9 months ago

OpenAI Clip python library fails because the model download is a hardcoded azure cdn url :(

ChuckMcM• 9 months ago

"On Prem" is looking better and better :-).

jasonthorsness• 9 months ago

Ahh it got me, Alaska air web site has an Azure outage banner

jmspring• 9 months ago

The outage was really weird. For me, parts of the portal worked, other parts didn't. I had access to a couple of resource groups, but no resources visible in those groups. Azure Devops Pipelines that needed do download from packages.microsoft.com didn't work.

The Microsoft status page mostly referenced the portal outage, but it was more than that.

bombcar6• 9 months ago

I hate these failures because you end up with things that keep working fine because the login credentials are cached, etc; but if you restart or otherwise refresh, you're doomed.

xer0x• 9 months ago

Wow, they are still down 12 hours later. :/

croemer5• 9 months ago

Not officially - status page says all healthy

nextworddev• 9 months ago

Fascinating timing given the APEC summit ;)

croemer5• 9 months ago

Preliminary post incident review: https://azure.status.microsoft/en-gb/status/history/

Timeline

15:45 UTC on 29 October 2025 – Customer impact began.

16:04 UTC on 29 October 2025 – Investigation commenced following monitoring alerts being triggered.

16:15 UTC on 29 October 2025 – We began the investigation and started to examine configuration changes within AFD.

16:18 UTC on 29 October 2025 – Initial communication posted to our public status page.

16:20 UTC on 29 October 2025 – Targeted communications to impacted customers sent to Azure Service Health.

17:26 UTC on 29 October 2025 – Azure portal failed away from Azure Front Door.

17:30 UTC on 29 October 2025 – We blocked all new customer configuration changes to prevent further impact.

17:40 UTC on 29 October 2025 – We initiated the deployment of our ‘last known good’ configuration.

18:30 UTC on 29 October 2025 – We started to push the fixed configuration globally.

18:45 UTC on 29 October 2025 – Manual recovery of nodes commenced while gradual routing of traffic to healthy nodes began after the fixed configuration was pushed globally.

23:15 UTC on 29 October 2025 - PowerApps mitigation of dependency, and customers confirm mitigation.

00:05 UTC on 30 October 2025 – AFD impact confirmed mitigated for customers.

onionisafruit4• 9 months ago

At 16:04 “Investigation commenced”. Then at 16:15 “We began the investigation”. Which is it?

not_a_bot_4sho2• 9 months ago

I read it as the second investigation being specific to AFD. The first more general.

ssss11• 9 months ago

Quick coffee run before we get stuck in mate

taco_emoji• 9 months ago

    16:04 Started running around screaming
    16:15 Sat down & looked at logs

xnorswap3• 9 months ago

33 minutes from impact to status page for a complete outage is a joke.

neya• 9 months ago

In Microsoft's defense, Azure has always been a complete joke. It's extremely developer unfriendly, buggy and overpriced.

sbergot3• 9 months ago

and for a while the status was "there might be issues on azure portal".

infaloda• 9 months ago

More importantly `15:45 UTC on 29 October 2025 – Customer impact began.

16:04 UTC on 29 October 2025 – Investigation commenced following monitoring alerts being triggered. ` A 19-minute delay in alert is a joke.

imglorp• 9 months ago

That's about how long it took to bubble up three levels of management and then go past the PR and legal teams for approvals.

thayne• 9 months ago

Unfortunately,that is also typical. I've seen it take longer than that for AWS to update their status page.

The reason is probably because changes to the status page require executive approval, because false positives could lead to bad publicity, and potentially having to reimburse customers for failing to meet SLAs.

HeavyStorm• 9 months ago

I've been on bridges where people _forgot_ to send comms for dozens of minutes. Too many inexperienced people around these days.

schainks• 9 months ago

AWS either is “on it” or you they will say something somewhere between 60-90 minutes after impact.

We should be lucky MSFT is so consistent!

Hug ops to the Azure team, since management is shredding up talent over there.

campbel• 9 months ago

As a technologist, you should always avoid MS. Even if they have a best-in-class solution for some domain, they will use that to leverage you into their absolute worst-in-class ecosystem.

oofbey• 9 months ago

“Our protection mechanisms, to validate and block any erroneous deployments, failed due to a software defect which allowed the deployment to bypass safety validations.”

Very circular way of saying “the validator didn’t do its job”. This is AFAICT a pretty fundamental root cause of the issue.

It’s never good enough to have a validator check the content and hope that finds all the issues. Validators are great and can speed a lot of things up. But because they are independent code paths they will always miss something. For critical services you have to assume the validator will be wrong, and be prepared to contain the damage WHEN it is wrong.

notorandit• 9 months ago

What puzzles me too is the time it took to recognize an outage.

Looks like there was no monitoring and no alerts.

Which is kinda weird.

hinkley14• 9 months ago

I've seen sensitivity get tuned down to avoid false positives during deployments or rolling restarts for host updates. And to a lesser extent for autoscaling noise. It can be hard to get right.

I think it's perhaps a gap in the tools. We apply the same alert criteria at 2 am that we do while someone is actively running deployment or admin tasks and there's a subset that should stay the same, like request failure rate, and others that should be tuned down, like overall error rate and median response times.

And it means one thing if the failure rate for one machine is 90% and something else if the cluster failure rate is 5%, but if you've only got 18 boxes it's hard to discern the difference. And which is the higher priority error may change from one project to another.

deadbolt• 9 months ago

Just what you want in a cloud provider, right?

neop1x• 9 months ago

> We began the investigation and started to examine configuration changes within AFD.

Troubleshooting has completed

Troubleshooting was unable to automatically fix all of the issues found. You can find more details below.

> We initiated the deployment of our ‘last known good’ configuration.

System Restore can help fix problems that might be making your computer run slowly or stop responding.

System Restore does not affect any of your documents, pictures, or other personal data. Recently installed programs and drivers might be uninstalled.

Confirm your restore point

Your computer will be restored to the state it was in before the event in the Description field below.

razodactyl• 9 months ago

AWS, now Azure - wasn't this a plot point in Terminator where SkyNet was causing computer systems to have issues much before it finally become self-aware?

Funnily enough, AI has been training on its own data as generated by users writing AI conversations back to the internet - there's a feedback loop at play.

major5052• 9 months ago

Somewhere, an ex microsoft engineer that where layoff during the last week, is saying to himself “thank god, this shit is not my problem anymore”

zimpenfish• 9 months ago

"Microsoft Azure will serve as the backbone of Asda’s digital infrastructure"[0]

Oh, that'll be why Scan & Go was down yesterday evening. I thought it was another instance of an iOS 26 update breaking their crappy code.

[0] https://corporate.asda.com/newsroom/2025/22/09/asda-announce...

Aldipower2• 9 months ago

Hetzner, Netcup, OVH, BunnyCDN, ClouDNS, Postmark

You name them. Other good providers you have experience with?

There is no reason for an expensive cloud. Never has been, but decision makers tried to keep their pants dry.

buttscicles• 9 months ago

Interesting that everybody knows when AWS goes down but Azure needs a "Tell HN" :)

Best of luck to the teams responding to this incident.

tartieret3• 9 months ago

I was a little puzzled as we got notified our apps were down, and then I tried to login in the Azure portal with no success. But the Azure status page reported no incident, so I posted here and quickly confirmed that others were impacted! They did a pretty bad job with their status page as the front door service was shown green all along

jammo• 9 months ago

We all need to move away from these big cloud providers. Two medium size smaller providers is enough.

-Cloudflare for R2 (object storage) and CDN (Fastly+backblaze also available). -Two VPS/Server providers with a decent reputation and mid-size (using a comparison site like https://serversearcher.com or look directly into people like Hetzner or latitude) -PlanetScale or Neon for database if you don't co-locate it, though better to use someone like digital ocean, vultr or latitude who offer databases too)

dspillett2• 9 months ago

We all need to move away from these big cloud providers.

But then who do we blame when things are down? If we manage our own infrastructure we have to stay late to fix it when it breaks instead of saying “sorry, Microsoft, nothing we can do” and magically our clients accepting that…

blcknight• 9 months ago

Ah yes, let's put our multibillion dollar ecommerce site on... checks notes Hetzner.

Lol

nflekkhnnn3• 9 months ago

Shut the front door!

DeathArrow• 9 months ago

Buy cloud because you're always safe! Until you aren't.

mnau• 9 months ago

It doesn't matter whether you actually are safe or not. What matters is that you are in compliance.

kure256• 9 months ago

We’ve been experimenting with multi-cluster failover for Kubernetes workloads, and one open-source project that actually works really well is k8gb .

It acts as a GSLB controller inside Kubernetes — doing DNS-level health checks, region awareness, and automatic failover between clusters when one goes down.

It integrates with ExternalDNS and supports multiple DNS providers (Infoblox, Route53, Azure DNS, NS1, etc.), so it can handle failover across both on-prem and cloud clusters.

It’s not a silver bullet for every architecture, but it’s one of the few OSS projects that make multi-region failover actually manageable in practice.

tartieret3• 9 months ago

it took a good half hour after we detected the problem to see a notification on the Azure status page. Thanks to those who responded to my question as it validated the issue was global and we contacted our users t right away

zaoui_amine2• 9 months ago

Yeah, Azure is a mess today. Can't do anything without the portal.

zaoui_amine2• 9 months ago

Language models aren't perfect; they can still generate similar outputs. Invertibility is a stretch.

altcognito• 9 months ago

wrong thread

FrostKiwi• 9 months ago

Surprised to see the situation getting worse, what the hell.

Had some Frontdoor operations timing out, but now I'm straight up denied with "Message: All Changes to Azure Frondoor Configuration are blocked currently."

What a mess.

shivenigma• 9 months ago

what's happening? self hosting advocate groups attacking all cloud to prove their point?

Tell HN: Azure outage

Related Stories