Tell HN: Azure is having a major outage
One hour into it, no status page update. Looks like Active Directory is down.
I guess they felt left out with all the AWS issues lately?
I guess they felt left out with all the AWS issues lately?
To the extent the phrase has meaning, the claim is still untrue; the International Date Line goes out of its way to avoid crossing Alaska.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Hemisphere
Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semisopochnoi_Island ("At 179°46' East (+179.7667) (in the Eastern Hemisphere), the easternmost tip of Semisopochnoi is, by longitude, the easternmost land location in the United States and North America.")
FWIW, Semisopochnoi Island is a TIL moment for me, too =)
Ask a geographer or cartographer about hemispheres.
They also don't have anything to do with how far east or west a point is.
You have two options:
1. East is the direction in which the Earth rotates, and West is the opposite direction. By this definition, no point on the earth has an east-coordinate or a west-coordinate.
2. East is the direction in which time gets later, and West is the direction in which time gets earlier. This is the only definition which will allow you to claim that one point is "more east" than another point. And it tells you that the difference between East and West is the International Date Line.
Latitude is absolute. Longitude is relative.
It’s looking good for longitude so far. Looks like people somehow manage to measure relative longitudes ok after all. Let’s check time zones.
“ You may notice, however, that the French collectivity of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon just to the south of Newfoundland is a half-hour ahead despite being at exactly the same longitude. By traveling west on the ferry from Newfoundland, you actually travel forward in time a half-hour.”
Oops. So by travelling consistently west in the same direction you can actually go back into a time zone you’ve previously left without crossing the date line. Not looking good. There are actually several places on Earth where this is possible. Here’s another good one. Is Kaliningrad east of Lithuania, or west of it?
“ All together, there are now three different areas where you gain two hours crossing time zones instead of just one. This also creates an unusual situation in the Kaliningrad Oblast exclave, which is now an hour ahead of Lithuania to its east, and two hours ahead of neighboring Poland.”
Good luck constructing a consistent reference frame out of that.
> “ Longitude is a geographic coordinate that specifies the east–west position of a point on the Earth's surface relative to the prime meridian.”
What was the disagreement? So you're 3° west of the prime meridian. How far west is that? Are you to the west of the prime meridian, or are you to its east?
The cycle will continue. What was old will become new again.
It is kind of already happening with Teleco world. Companies like Dish and Vodafone partner with AWS & GCP. These telecos buy their own OpenRAN hardware from Nokia or Ericsson and manage it using AWS, GCP, Azure software.
I hadn't thought of them in the context of "hire cheaper non-cloud servers for your baseline load and storage".
Original quote in Chinese: ＂话说天下大势，分久必合，合久必分。＂
Edit: looks like it's AAD that's having a bad day.
- Folks on Azure are active-active in multiple availability zones
- Most of those using Azure are not impacted by this particular outage
- Azure isn't widely used
...
Why would people on Azure be more likely than people on AWS to have redundancy? Anyway, in the recent AWS outages, multiple AZs didn't help much. Needed to be in multiple regions.
AWS is far more popular in general, but especially with smaller teams that are more self-directed, start with prototypes and iterate from there. It wouldn't surprise my if the latter often only built in redundancy after learning lessons the hard way, even though AWS provides the ability to do so from the get go.
Purely conjecture, but that skew in the customer type is definitely there.
Porting over to Azure AD probably wasn’t such an issue then, as most firms would lift&shift their on-prem to the cloud, keeping the same configurations.
AWS and GitHub seem to crater right when everyone is using them the most (i.e. 10am EST on a Tuesday), so there is bound to be far more discussion around these occurrences since everyone is wired on coffee, ass-in-chair, frustrated that they can't get any work done. People usually don't get out of bed and then get on the internet to complain about a transient outage that occurred while they were asleep.
This is more like Amazon’s IAM product being down than AWS as a whole.
except that's not really comprable either, because Azure AD is actually pretty broadly used.
The update that caused an issue, was at a pretty good time ( 20:42 EST ). So that probably explains it.
> A shared component of the Microsoft account (MSA) and Azure AD sign-in services stopped responding when a combination of a configuration error and a routine update caused multiple redundant endpoints to become unreachable. This caused sign-in failures in Microsoft services for both Microsoft personal accounts and Azure AD accounts.
https://portal.azure.com/#blade/Microsoft_Azure_Health/Azure...
Source: I'm a former Azure intern
I think the crazy uptime we normally get from the cloud has seriously skewed people's perceptions of how things used to be on-prem. I personally remember when my Fortune 50 former employer had multiple multi-day email outages in one year.
i know it's extremely unlikely, but that kind of cleverness would be pretty cool.
"our new sexy feature x went down for an hour today."
"wait, what? they offer x as a service now?"