Failure

Yesterday was a demonstration of how even the biggest tech giants can have massive failures. Microsoft who is one of the largest business email providers in the world had a massive and prolonged outage starting around lunchtime yesterday which is still not fully resolved as of this morning. They claim this was not a malicious attack which caused the outage, rather some sort mass failure of backend servers caused by failing some sort of “health check”. I highly doubt we are being fed the truth and if it was some sort of malicious action that caused the failure Microsoft would not be very eager to reveal it. This is the longest outage of their services that I ever recall in my decades of time in IT.

It is the sort of event that shakes the assumption that your email will just work. In today’s IT environment the level of redundancy and resiliency is designed to make this very scenario implausible. To have it collapse like this and then stay down for 18-20 hours is a massive black eye for Microsoft. It is going to be very interesting when the truth is revealed about what actually has happened. The outage also affected my home email which I host via Microsoft as well. Email is so integrated into so many aspects of your digital life that when it is eliminated certain things just grind to a halt.

This weekend is looking pretty mundane, especially since the pickleball courts will be unavailable for public play since they are hosting a large tournament. At least the Eagles have a bye week so I don’t have to subject myself to listening to or watching them stink up the field yet again.