back to article Office 365 celebrates National Beer Day by popping out for a pint

Office 365 is suffering a stuttering start to the weekend with UK users complaining this morning that the service has slowed to a crawl or stopped altogether. The first hint of a problem came at 1004, UK time, with users complaining about connectivity issues with Office 365 and Azure. Anyone have issues with slow Office 365 …

  1. Dan 55 Silver badge
    Mushroom

    We're all good!

    Oh do eff off with your matey second-person plural error messages all over Office and Windows.

    1. Waseem Alkurdi

      Speaking of "matey" error messages

      Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart. We're just slurp...collecting some error info and then we'll restart for you.

      This is cringeworthy. WHO THE FUCK IS "WE"????!!!!!!!!!!!

      1. Hans 1
        Joke

        Re: Speaking of "matey" error messages

        They have detected a bipolar user, maybe ?

        1. defiler

          Re: Speaking of "matey" error messages

          I'm wondering if it's the same one person that's downvoted all of these. And if they're the person responsible...

        2. Robert Helpmann??
          Pint

          Re: Speaking of "matey" error messages

          bipolar user, maybe

          Dissociative identity disorder, you mean. People with this rare condition are often victims of severe abuse such as being made to use Office 365. To avoid the effects, it is best to prophylactically administer 800mg of fugidol. If that does not work, repeat dosage until desired state is obtained. See icon for generic version of fugidol.

        3. Hans 1
          Windows

          Re: Speaking of "matey" error messages

          Actually, I think Windows has dissociative identity disorder with "Universal Windows Platform" and "Desktop" apps, so it logically refers to itself as we.

    2. TheVogon

      Re: We're all good!

      No packet loss for us in the UK via Megaport directly to O365 via Linx so suspect the issue was external to MS

    3. caffeine addict

      Re: We're all good!

      I prefer fake matey-ness to the bane of my life "Windows has recovered from an unexpected shutdown".

      No, you fecking didn't. Nothing has been "recovered". You shit the bed, threw the sheets out the window, and are now sitting on a soiled mattress boasting about how everything's under control.

    4. John Slater

      Re: We're all good!

      * First person plural

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    About Time MS were taken to task

    It clearly isn't available 365 days a year and is therefore not as it says on the 'tin' (or in 1pt white on white on page 32472 of the license acreement).

    I though this 'cloud thingy' was supposed to improve availability? Pah! Bah Humbug.

    1. Anonymous Coward Silver badge
      Alien

      Re: About Time MS were taken to task

      It's a bit like that torch (flashlight) I purchased from China... '3W' emblazoned on the handle. Turns out that's the model number and the power draw of the emitter is more like 1W

      So 365 is simply the release number... they basically really fucked up after Office 6 and have taken 359 further release attempts to get to something that is only as shit as what we now see.

    2. Waseem Alkurdi

      Re: About Time MS were taken to task

      I though this 'cloud thingy' was supposed to improve availability? Pah! Bah Humbug.

      Instead of having one point where things could break (the user's workstation), cloud mitigates the issue by giving you two more points of breakage (Internet connectivity with everything along the way + the cloud provider).

      So much for improving availability.

    3. Hans 1
      Windows

      Re: About Time MS were taken to task

      It clearly isn't available 365 days a year and is therefore not as it says on the 'tin'

      Yeah, more like 340 and counting, still much better than last year ... it had reached 320 by summer, iirc ... Of course, that is calculated as 365 - <#_days_with_TITSUPs>

      Then again, poor Redmond has to put up with piss poor Windows Update behavior, the constant reboots and shit because it only just patched the systems ... so ... yeah ... I think MS deserve a little bit of empathy, at this point. Let's all try very, very, very hard ...

      Segmentation fault

      Well, :D

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: About Time MS were taken to task

        I wonder if they have a sign on a white board at Microsoft with this,

        Day since last outage __

        Target: 365

        Years Achieved: 0

      2. TheVogon

        Re: About Time MS were taken to task

        "Then again, poor Redmond has to put up with piss poor Windows Update behavior"

        For CBB that enterprises use you get 18 months from GA or 2 years from first release to update before you are out of support. Hardly unreasonable.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: About Time MS were taken to task

          "For CBB that enterprises use you get 18 months from GA or 2 years from first release to update before you are out of support. Hardly unreasonable."

          It's not so much the policy that's the issue, it's that the actual technology behind Windows Update and the patches is archaic and in desperate need of overhaul.

    4. TheVogon

      Re: About Time MS were taken to task

      "It clearly isn't available 365 days a year"

      The SLA is 99.9%. So about 8 hours unplanned downtime a year or you get service credits. Evaluated on a monthly basis.

      1. John Slater

        Re: About Time MS were taken to task

        Obviously they were ahead of their SLA this month, so they had to shut it down for a few hours to get back on track

    5. Nematode

      Re: About Time MS were taken to task

      "I though this 'cloud thingy' was supposed to improve availability?"

      The Cloud is merely the latest name for Thin Client. Didn't work then, either

    6. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
      Joke

      Re: About Time MS were taken to task

      (or in 1pt white on white on page 32472 of the license acreement).

      It's actually on page 32768, but causes Word to crash due the 8-bit value limitation of the page counter. Clever of them :-)

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: About Time MS were taken to task

        "It's actually on page 32768, but causes Word to crash due the 8-bit value limitation of the page counter. "

        That problem would be in using signed arithmetic on a 16 bit value.

        Back in the days when 128KB was a BIG mainframe - the O/S threw up lots of careless usage of signed arithmetic in calculating 16 bit addresses when it grew to above 32KB. After clearing that obstacle the next crop of crashes were in using 16bit unsigned arithmetic instructions with 32bit addresses bigger than 64KB.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Remember the good old days?

    You worked on your Office stuff online, no need to log in.

    To share stuff, you emailed or copied to a portable drive, or transferred to a shared network drive.

    1. Waseem Alkurdi
      Trollface

      Re: Remember the good old days?

      online

      You certainly mean offline.

      But yeah, hell of days they were! From 2005 (my first computer) till 2012 (when my parents finally understood that the Internet was not a porn tube) I had no Internet at home (got all software I needed to play around with via pirated CDs of mega-collections for the equivalent of half a dollar each). And I learned my way to computer geekdom. Tell that to the YouTube-tutorial generation!

      Heck, I feel old! xD

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Remember the good old days?

        >Heck, I feel old! xD

        Try being around in the mid-90s when ads in computer magazines were offering CDs with the entire contents of the Internet on them :)

        1. caffeine addict

          Re: Remember the good old days?

          Try being around in the mid-90s when ads in computer magazines were offering CDs with the entire contents of the Internet on them :)

          It was great that they gave them away free every month, but needing a new one every month was a bit wasteful.

        2. a_yank_lurker

          Re: Remember the good old days?

          @AC - Try punch cards and paper tape.

          1. Alistair
            Pint

            Re: Remember the good old days?

            @a_yank_lurker:

            I do. I try very hard to forget. Icon is relevant.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Remember the good old days?

      I remember those day before these always connected, always available, ultra reliable clouds came along and improved everything no end.

    3. Geoffrey W

      Re: Remember the good old days?

      Hate to be a wet blanket but, no one ever had a machine go down and the document you need is only on that machine? Or your file server fails? Or your local installation got corrupted and the software refused to run? Or some oik ran off with your machine? Or a document is corrupted and you suddenly find your careful backups had a flaw lurking and the doc isn't there? Or...Or...

      Everything has its up and down sides. Surely the answer is both cloud solutions and local ones together? One fails, fall back to the other. I like to have both.

      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

        Re: Remember the good old days?

        "Hate to be a wet blanket but, no one ever had a machine go down and the document you need is only on that machine? Or your file server fails? Or your local installation got corrupted and the software refused to run? Or some oik ran off with your machine? Or a document is corrupted and you suddenly find your careful backups had a flaw lurking and the doc isn't there? Or...Or..."

        But then it's your own fault, or that of someone you know and/or work with and it can be dealt with in some way. With "cloud", it's some nebulous fault you can't find, have no control over and can do absolutely nothing about. That leaves not just users but the entire business with a feeling of helplessness and are at the mercy of possibly multiple 3rd parties all blaming each other.

  4. Michael Jarve

    To be fair to customers...

    To be fair to Microsoft, operational dependency on any single environment will result in a single point of failure it's the customer's fault for using their product, which is never a good thing.

    FIXED

  5. Spacedinvader
    Pint

    National Beer Day

    Another I did not know about. Last week World Gin Day, now Beer day. Life's good!

  6. GlenP Silver badge

    And only yesterday an MS Sales Drone was trying to persuade me to look at their cloudy offerings.

    OK so if we have a major network problem on prem we'll likely have similar issues (then switch to the slower but independent backup line or worst case bring the offsite DR server online with the latest available data) but we'll be high up the list to "get it fixed".

    1. Waseem Alkurdi
      Trollface

      And only yesterday an MS Sales Drone was trying to persuade me to look at their cloudy offerings.

      Okay, propose an offer which will give him a cardiac attack:

      Get one (or one-quarter of a) license of Office 2010 (or 2003 for the gags), install on a terminal server, and let your folks use it. Bonus points if the terminal server in question is offsite behind a partition in your server room and outsourced to a company of which you are the only board member. Then do what the BOFH did before this happened.

  7. Locky
    Mushroom

    Office 358

    Put it all in the cloud they said.

    It'll be resilient they said.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Office 364.9 coming soon.

    1. defiler

      But only on a leap year.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    the service has slowed to a crawl or stopped altogether.

    but... THE CLOUD was meant to solve ALL problems suffered by the humankind?! The cloud and AI of course!

    p.s. and BREXIT!

    1. MiguelC Silver badge

      Re: the service has slowed to a crawl or stopped altogether.

      Trust the Cloud, the Cloud is good, the Cloud is father, the Cloud is mother...

      1. Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
        Happy

        Re: the service has slowed to a crawl or stopped altogether.

        Is the m$ cheif problem solver a guy named "Bester" by any chance?

  10. MrKrotos

    I though this 'cloud thingy' was supposed to improve availability? Pah! Bah Humbug.

    Office 365 ISNT CLOUD!

    Its a hosted service, nothing cloud about it at all!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I though this 'cloud thingy' was supposed to improve availability? Pah! Bah Humbug.

      Really? The marketing literature of Office 365 says switching to Office 365 is equivalent to 'moving to the cloud'.

      https://products.office.com/business/office

      ---

      Free Microsoft e-book:

      https://resources.office.com/ww-landing-nine-myths-ebook-pct-ms.html

      "9 myths about moving to the cloud"

      "Today, people work in more places than just the office, and they get work done on more devices than their office PC. Office 365 gives businesses the agility they need to help their people be productive wherever they are. But, unfortunately, there are still a lot of myths about working in the cloud. Companies worry about security and privacy. They feel that cloud migration is all or nothing. Sometimes, they don’t want to migrate because they think it will be harder to manage."

      1. MrKrotos

        Re: I though this 'cloud thingy' was supposed to improve availability? Pah! Bah Humbug.

        And you lap up everything MS says in their marketing?

        If you think Office365 is a cloud service I have a bridge for sale.

        Its basiclly a custom Exchange setup, it is not a cloud service.

        MS keep very quiet about that little fact lol

    2. Scroticus Canis
      Holmes

      Re: "Office 365 ISNT CLOUD!"

      It's still fecking vaporware on the cloud or off.

  11. defiler

    Funnily enough, we're fine.

    Oh yeah. That's because we run our own Exchange servers with site failover. Hmm...

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: Funnily enough, we're fine.

      "Oh yeah. That's because we run our own Exchange servers with site failover. Hmm..."

      We used to until recently. Now email is always slow anyway, that's just SOP. Being on the road, I do most of my mail access on the phone and the Outlook app takes at least 3 times longer to open and connect, and 3x longer to open an email than the Android mail app taking to our own Exchange server did. Having said that, I didn't notice anything unusual on Friday but then I don't get that many emails per day. At least half are just people at HQ who think the rest of the company are interested in their day to day operations.

  12. Laughing Gravy

    Still Smug

    I never tire reading about M$ fuck ups

  13. PeteCarr

    O365 Support Agent recommended an upgrade to Outlook 2016!

    OWA, O365 Admin Portal & Sharepoint weren't working, O365 support were aware of the problem. They tried to convince me that our Outlook 2013 connectivity problem was unrelated and upgrading to Outlook 2016 would fix it...

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Facepalm

    Obviously...

    I blame the Virtual BOFH

  15. John Slater

    Does Office 365 go down for 24 hours every February 29th?

  16. TheVogon

    MO141957 - Office 365 application connectivity issues

    Status:

    Service degradation

    User impact:

    Users may experience intermittent connectivity issues when accessing the service with the Outlook client and other apps.

    Latest message:

    Title: Office 365 application connectivity issues

    User Impact: Users experienced intermittent connectivity issues when accessing the service with the Outlook client and other apps.

    More info: Our monitoring indicates that web clients and mobile applications were not impacted by this issue. Word, Excel, and Power Point documents may have been affected by this issue if they're hosted on OneDrive for Business and were being opened from the associated client.

    Final status: We reconfigured the way active service usage is balanced across the infrastructure and monitored service health to confirm impact remediation.

    Scope of impact: This issue could have potentially affected any of your users intermittently if they were routed through the affected infrastructure.

    Start time: Friday, June 15, 2018, at 12:40 PM UTC

    End time: Friday, June 15, 2018, at 3:50 PM UTC

    Preliminary root cause: A configuration issue caused active service usage to become unbalanced within the infrastructure.

    Next steps:

    - We're analyzing performance data and trends on the affected systems to help prevent this problem from happening again.

    This is the final update for the event.

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