Never having used any of the software products mentioned in this article, I have no dog in this fight.
TechCrunch reports that Microsoft has begun investigating an authentication outage that looked Office 365 users out of the platform preventing them from accessing Microsoft products such as Office, Outlook, and Teams.
Microsoft’s status dashboard stated that the issue started at 2:25 p.m. PT on Monday and impacted users across the globe for hours. Microsoft stated that some government users may be impacted by the issue, which may have impacted 911 communications in 14 states. The company stated in a series of tweets that it attempted to fix the issue but was forced to roll back its changes after the fix failed.
Yeah, let’s hear it for the Internet Of Things and Skynet, shall we?
My favorite part, though, is that elsewhere, Microsoft has steadfastly denied that the problem stemmed from a security breach / hack attack.
Which leaves… incompetence.
But you guys already knew that about MS.
We’re all software sharecroppers now.
Yeah, we used to buy software, now we are only allowed to rent it.
The thing is that MS software is the defacto standard, kinda going back to the 1980s when everyone said “No one ever got fired for buying IBM computers”. I use MS software daily, it’s what’s on my work-issued computer and it’s what the company standards require. So if something goes wrong, lots of things stop working.
Having spend my nearly 35 career working on computer systems of all sizes, I can tell you that one of my college profs was absolutely correct when he said “There are two types of computer systems, those that are working but have bugs, and those that aren’t working at all”. Most big systems are held together with the software equivalent of duct tape, bubble gum and baling wire, and those are the systems that more-or-less work.
Would it have less impact on business to have a variety of different software systems in use, so a failure in one doesn’t crash your whole business? Sure, but it would also be more expensive in a manner that’s hard to justify, plus you’d have to have support for all those different packages. After all, MS software never crashed, until it did.
The famous Microsoft Blue Screen of Death.
And now, we’re supposed to RENT the Office and other programs from Microsoft. It’s getting so I’d go Mac, but my tech friends have all gone Unix, so maybe I’ll do that.
Software Sharecroppers is right. Another way to send a signal out and disable all your stuff if you suddenly become Persona non grata to our government betters.
Microsoft… didn’t they use to sell a clunky disk operating system, back before Linux?
.
Fuck software as a service, and everyone involved needs a free helicopter ride when we’re out of commies.
To err is human. To replicate an error a hundred thousand times in a second requires a computer.
Which is why I will NEVER own a ‘self driving’ car.