Microsoft Teams goes down just as Europe logs on to work remotely | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Teams goes down just as Europe logs on to work remotely

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68 pointsJDEW42 comments

I'm in an office in the North East of the UK and MSFT Teams is working fine.

Your nines are not my nines https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2019/07/15/giant/

Yes. Mid-meeting we actually switched from Skype for Business to Teams because the sound quality was very bad and screen sharing was essentially impossible.

Worked fine in France as well, all morning.

Works for my kids as well but it is a bit slow.

FWIW the Teams client seems to work a lot faster than the website.

COVID-19 is going to be global scale proof of work for remote work - both for companies and for networks.

People have significant others and children at home. Even people that work remote full time will be taking a productivity hit during the COVID-19 disruptions. I fear companies are going to look at the decreased productivity and conclude that remote work isn’t viable for them.

They should first discount the major productivity loss that's caused by people nervously refreshing news about COVID-19 all day long. That's not the fault of remote work, and will hopefully go away with the virus.

Still, many don't have the space to work distration-free with children at home when schools are closed. Open-plan offices can be noise, young children at home tend to be noisier.

My manager(people manager) has the same opinion. But in reality he is afraid that people might question what's does he do anyway if every one works from home. Companies are going to find out people managers job are really not as important.

In my companies it's the managers telling people to work from home when possible and parents asking to come in at least every other day to have some hours of distraction-free work.

Genuinely, I think this will backfire and it will be proof that remote working isn't for everyone..

I don't think it's going to show anything worthwhile as the whole pandemic thing is a huge confounding factor and the adoption has been hugely ad hoc. In particular people are going to suddenly find themselves working from home in completely unsuitable conditions and the whole social distancing thing means normal remote ideas like coworking spaces and coffee shops aren't really an option.

As someone who has been remotely working mostly from my home for two years today I'm joined by my wife and a three year old and a five year old. My work desk is in the living room as our house is teensy and trying to do anything of substance with two kids is very hard! On top of the added stress caused by the global situation being a distraction in itself.

My wife should be remote working but a last minute change meant it's now up in the air whether her office will actually allow VPN access. This is after they issued her with a brand new laptop, monitor and so on. So now she's spending the day at home tidying up our storage.

Remote work in this context is nothing more than trying to keep the wheels turning and people expecting the benefits that come with doing it more deliberately are definitely going to be disappointed.

I agree. I work remotely quite often, around a week every month - but I do feel like productivity has been reduced just because people around me also have reduced productivity, are less available on IM, etc.. I also miss going into the office and being there physically, even though I don't really sit at my desk, it's nice to have the space there.

I think so too, since the introduction will be anything but organized. People asking if they can just move their workstation to home...

But currently MS Teams is working fine in central Europe (Ger). There also isn't any incident report in the Office 365 portal.

There are some interesting browser based soft-vpn solutions that could work for a large amount of users. They could connect to their individual workstation instead of some terminal server that never was meant to support more than 20 concurrent users.

Given how busy the beach is this morning (UK), I'm presuming that everyone is taking full advantage of working from home.

It will be interesting to see how productivity is affected overall though.

Which makes me wonder, what is the general measure of productivity?

Meetings attended? Emails answered? Hours worked / Time in seat? Story points?

I don't know.

If it's valueable it will be the new normal, independent of it "being for anyone".

Will it? Won't it just prove that people might be able to "get by" at reduced productivity if they're suddenly forced to work remotely without being a "work remote" kind of person, or are properly equipped for it?

conferring immunity to future infections

Let the people managers keep complaining how remote work is not going to work .In the meanwhile i share my amazing tip.

If you are on ubuntu and want to remote desktop to windows machine try this opensource amazing freerdp tool

$ sudo apt install freerdp2-x11 $ xfreerdp '/u:domain\username' /p:PasswordSuperSecret /v:hostname.com /w:1920 /h:1080 -grab-keyboard /monitors:0 -themes -wallpaper +fonts +clipboard -decorations

In italy some big universities (like those in Milan) started using microsoft teams for streaming lectures and indeed they already had problems last week. My girlfriend who studies there said she was constantly disconnected from the service each 2-3 minutes and had to wait the same time to reconnect successfully

Zoom and similar providers must be having to ramp up capacity quite significantly at the moment!

Would it be better if instead of relying on centralized servers, we used p2p solutions like Jitsi, which is based on WebRTC? Some universities and companies could even set up TURN servers for public use

I doubt these outages will hurt Microsoft at all.

I am sure that AWS, Azure and Google Cloud will be the next victims of COVID-19. There's just no way to scale infrastructure up as fast as necessary. People think about cloud as 'elastic' but there's a fixed number of data centers with a fixed number of servers in each at any give time.

Are you suggesting GCP/AWS/Azure will run out of capacity because of higher usage?

I am. They weren't built for the times with EVERYONE needs to scale up at the same time.

GC maybe, but AWS operates on another level.

Not sure what it's like nowadays, but 5 or so years ago, GC were very proud of being able to scale from 0 to a million users pretty much instantly. [0]

At the time AWS needed pre-warming. I've not needed to do that since, so I'm just assuming AWS solved that one (or everyone moved to serverless).

Obviously that's not the same as overall capacity, but the AWS good, everyone else bad rhetoric needs challenging sometimes.

Ouch.. that was a long time ago..

0: https://www.forbes.com/sites/reuvencohen/2013/11/26/google-s...

I don't think we're talking about scaling out one cloud customers infra here, but scaling out many of them at once.

Correct, the issue is what do you do when everyone needs to scale up at the same time - Slack, Box, Netflix, etc.

As someone who used GCP at large scale very recently, "stock outs" we're very common for large instance types in specific zones.

My manager forced me to use teams, and I gotta say its down half the time, messages go late. Its basically as bad As skype and there is no reason it should be better in the future.

Microsoft is terrible at making product and will remain so for the future.

Not completely true. VSCode is not so bad in general, and for an electron app it is actually great. I also kinda like their wireless sculpt desktop (keyboard+mouse). But the rest is garbage indeed.

Agreed. I forget VSCode is an electron app. I do not forget that MSTeams is.

I don't really mind Teams, but the fact you can't drop an image in to a chat to upload it like you can in Slack really annoys me.

Huh? I just tried this and it worked flawlessly

I don't mind both, but don't get why should I use Slack/Teams (without Active Directory integration) when for example Telegram added nice group management into the messenger? More feature rich then both of these, suitable for teams. Ah, no group/video calls... But in case they add group calls - the app will become pretty good for even office communication.

You could already do that in MSN Messenger like, 15 or 20 years ago.

Well Teams is not a direct descendant of Messenger, so it's not like they broke that function. For me that's not a good point.

But, for the record it doesn't work for me either.

> My manager forced me to use teams

You know ... either quit or deal with the fact that not everybody in the world will accommodate you. I also don't like teams but common ... just buck up a bit. It could be worse, it could be actual Skype or Cisco jabber.

I think Teams is actually just leveraging the Skype backend. I looked at some of the network calls happening in their web app, and some requests are referencing skype (e.g. https://amer.ng.msg.teams.microsoft.com/v1/users/ME/conversa...)

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