Unsure why you can't log into Office 365? So is Microsoft Microsoft's Office 365 has been giving some users cold sweats. No matter how hard they try to log in, they simply can't access the service and haven't been able to for hours – others say it has wobbled for days. Sporadic reports of unrest began to emerge on Down Detector on Friday (26 October) in the UK and across the pond, …
F@AC ail fast, Fail often yes, but when you put it in the cloud that becomes expected behaviour unlike internal services.
We are learning (or being taught) to accept a Cr@p service because it's "Agile". I personally don't really want to be experimented on regularly with my primary tools my corporate masters decide I have no option to use however.
Most people only use about 5% of the office capabilities anyway, and most of the changes now seem to be just to keep developers busy rather than improve the product. Win 10 is going the same way - development is becoming destabilising tinkering instead of actual development
</RANT>
"I wonder when people will wake up and realise the size of the barrel that MS has them draped over?"
It's not just Microsoft. Google wants you to do all your productivity work in the cloud too. In fact, it seems all of Sillycon Valley has been seduced to the cloud-side.
I say, yet again, that all software developers who think using the cloud is a "good idea" should be dropped, on an annual basis, into the middle of the Mojave Desert with their precious cloud computing devices to see just how much work they can get done when there's no internet to be found.
Isn't that obvious ? As was demonstrated when they had an "isolated" data centre failure, their systems are globally intertwined like a platetruckload of spaghetti. If you ever install a tool like Little Snitch and allow connections from Outlook one at a time then you will find that simply signing in requires the program to follow a long list of DNS redirects (from memory at least half a dozen) that send the connections all round the world.
Given the way things seem to be built, it's a wonder it ever works at all !
Also makes a mockery of any claims to be compliant with GDPR - I hope no-one here is using O365 for anything business related and relying on Microsoft's claims ;-)
I have a tiny (almost invisible) scrap of sympathy for the manijur-level ijits and their hasbeencounters who get suckered into cloud: they are so frequently the kind of twits who say things like "I don't do detail", as if they're actually proud of their laziness, or think it's clever to make whooshing-hand-over-head gestures when challenged by fourth-grade arithmetic—it's plainly true that air pollution has caused a massive drop in intelligence, if corporate senior management are any indication—BUT, to topic: they don't know any better. They'd accept anything a Microsoft saleslizard said to them if it promised a boost to their "cost savings" bonus next January.
We technical types have no excuses.
We know perfectly well that systems (sometimes not even massively large ones) can become so complex that no one person, however smart, can hold all of its functions and foibles in his/her head. The ever-increasing layers of programming have run the gamut in 50 years from punching in hex on a pad to writing incredibly abstracted, layered OO code with mouse clicks. We can build very complex and powerful systems, but with ever diminishing understanding of how the clockwork really meshes to make things happen even on a good day. It's easy to write today in ten minutes or an hour what would have taken a day or two many years ago; it's also predictable that the old code would have been sized in kilobytes at most, while the new will scale to megabytes at least.
My point being that the ever-increasing and supposedly productivity-oriented layering of the cloud in particular has created multiple and incredibly elaborate levels of abstraction, some of it the result of algorithms creating other algorithms, often monitored and checked and managed by code whose only job is to handle the inevitable errors and exceptions, with the result that (a) no one truly understands even a tenth of it, (b) it is increasingly vulnerable to tiny glitches ramifying through the entire thing, causing entirely unpredictable and often bizarre effects, (c) it is too big and expensive to re-engineer for reliability, so instead it keeps acquiring cancerous "fixes", which are really hastily-slapped on kludges of sloppy code upon worse code upon bad code upon mediocre code upon what was once, when you dig deep enough, half-decent code.
At some point, the cloud becomes monster of dubious reliability and, even worse, can no longer be provably defined as secure. Both consequences should be scary. "Cloud" really does mean "amorphous and poorly understood mess".
Executives and bean-counters aren't capable of understanding this, I accept (and are incentivised not to understand anything which negatively affects remuneration anyway) ...
... but what excuse do the rest of us have?
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