Customers advising Azure Tech Support:
"Have you tried rebooting it?"
Microsoft is recovering somewhat from a bad case of the Mondays that left some of its subscribers unable to use multi-factor authentication to log into their cloud services. The Redmond giant said that around 2130 UTC today it had managed to get its Azure Cloud back up and running as per normal. Meanwhile, Office 364 is still …
Picked up a cheap fido u2f key.... These are great and work well in linux, easy config change. Browser support? You have to turn it on via config in firefox, enabled in chrome. Works with gmail nicely if you set your browser to remove cookie on close.
Windows,... well no. Apparently there is V 1.2 of the standard which has been called U2F 2.0 microsoft is a partner. The standard is still in the process of being ratified (As far as I can tell) and hardware is scant and difficult to tell what version. i.e. a mess.
What is the link? Microsoft somehow really messes up two factor authentication. Accident or embrace, extend, extinguish?
My guess..... both.
Its a shame that this happened on the same day that the public transport system suffered a significant failure requiring a far higher number of people to work from home. I expect that the two are linked in some way.
You have to ask though, why didn't MS capacity management notice that they were getting close to a hard limit in one of their platforms, I thought this was one of the big pluses of Cloud - <sarc>you don't have to worry about all of that, we do it for you and do it better than you can</sarc>
I wonder if MS should look at AWS Elasticache, that can be scaled out elastically and it uses redis too, so migration to it should be simple.
Build with confidence with 99.99% VM uptime
Translation: We think we know what an SLA is but we just never thought it might apply to us.
"Its a shame that this happened on the same day that the public transport system suffered a significant failure requiring a far higher number of people to work from home. I expect that the two are linked in some way."
Well yes - without access to their cat pictures by email the drivers couldn't get in...
To the tune of the "Car 54 where are you" theme...
*ahem*
There's a network bottleneck
Routers blinking all those lights
Network traffic jams are forming
Backup data not in sight
Users screaming like a child
Workload forms a monstrous pile...
Office 364 where are you???
I propose that El Reg officially names Office 3xx for the number of days it can still remain online. So, on January 1st, it is Office 365. If it falls over for a day somewhere during February, it becomes Office 364.
Feel free to dole out decimals for hour outages, but where it falls over doesn't matter (ie if it is only the European users that cannot access, it still counts in the global number).
Process plants are commonly designed to run for 8000 hours/year, allowing time for routine maintenance and upgrades throughout that year.
I'd be quite happy to pitch this to my users if MS would provide a 10% reduction in fees. And serious recompense if they fell below that.
As it stands Microsoft seem to be achieving about 0.93 of a year, or about 1 unit of factory uptime.
As to the name of the El Reg unit, I nominate it "the Tony" after Factory Records founder Tony Wilson.
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