Comment by mrmondo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrmondo | Hacker News Reader

The status page reads as below (I've copied the text here as it a) may not be accessible to everyone and b) often has old information removed / edited, c) this status page / information is usually pay-walled and only available once you've authenticated):

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Microsoft 365 Service health status

Title: Unable to access Microsoft 365 services

User impact: Affected users are unable to authenticate to and access Microsoft 365 services.

Current status: We've received reports of an issue affecting access to Microsoft 365 services. We've identified a degraded portion of infrastructure that manages authentication requests and have restarted that infrastructure to mitigate impact.

Scope of impact: This issue may potentially affect any of your users attempting to access Microsoft 365 services.

Start time: Tuesday, January 29, 2019, at 9:15 PM UTC

Preliminary root cause: A portion of infrastructure that manages authentication requests is degraded, affecting access to one or more Microsoft 365 services.

I love how they are just "turning it off and on again".

That's literally the fix for almost anything Microsoft. If it goes any further than that it's "Restore from backup".

"Thank you for calling 310-DELL. Have to tried restarting your computer?"

(Older Canadian tech types should recognize that.)

It's pretty common practice for complex systems. If it's already dead, and nobody knows what's wrong or how to fix it, you try restarting it. (normally you first redirect traffic to a different region, but apparently big orgs are still running critical infrastructure with changes that affect all regions and can't be backed out)

Kubernetes doesn't even have a "restart this deployment" ability...

Update: "Preliminary root cause: A portion of third-party managed network infrastructure that facilitates authentication requests and access to Microsoft 365 services was degraded."

(Emphasis mine.)

That doesn’t seem right. For something so critical to many of their corporate mega-customers, there shouldn’t be any “third-party managed” infrastructure at all.

More so that there should be redundancy if it's a critical system.

"network infrastructure" - it'll be a fiber cut or failed router, together with a failover process that didn't work or was overlooked.

That’s not how the internet works. Every large provider has third-party connectivity. There’s no wire from Microsoft to your house.

You can buy connectivity from 5 diverse providers per data center, but if one of them continues to advertise your routes while not being able to actually pass traffic to your destination, you’re “down” to some people through no fault of your own.

I’ve had this happen with AT&T, XO/Verizon, and Cogent in recent years. It’s not uncommon. In all cases it was mis-configured ISP routers. Usually a support engineer admits a QoS or DDoS-protection configuration went wrong.

Not sure why I was down-voted for this, it's a direct copy-paste of the service status page which a) may not be accessible to everyone and b) often has old information removed.

> Not sure why I was down-voted for this, it's a direct copy-paste of the service status page

Being a direct copy and paste of th page linked to the thread without additional explanation is probably why it was downvoted.

... there's a pretty damn good explanation given in the comment actually

and it's pretty obvious regardless: status pages are highly transient. it's probably good to have a record of what's being discussed?

They edited their comment after which now makes it clearer why copy/pasted.

Please don't clutter the comments by copying and pasting what is already a fairly succinct page.

I don't agree with this. Not everyone wants to click an extra link when browsing on a mobile device.

Also to note: status pages are, by their nature, transient. Having a record of what it previously said is helpful context for any discussion regarding those prior contents.

As I said below the "status page which a) may not be accessible to everyone and b) often has old information removed"

You made that comment after I had made mine, so I had not seen it.

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