Microsoft Teams down for thousands of users
reuters.com
reuters.com
On top of all that, if you don't have a "Microsoft/Office365 Business" account, you can't even connect/join a meeting from a handful of clients, depending on if you're chatting or teleconferencing. Only Chrome/Edge works on browser, I can't remember if Android works at all without a business account, the Linux client kinda works? It was such a pain when I tried to interview with a Teams-using org that I think I just sent them a Zoom invite, which of course just works everywhere.
Once during a company meeting the mute function stopped working so a few dozen people could hear me making an emergency call to the doctor. That was fun. Support never gave me an explanation for why the mute button didn't mute my mic.
FWIW, the UI of your average teleconferencing app is way simpler than a chat app and the state is only relevant in the moment which makes both the front end and backend easier to design due to a lack of search or history. The actual "conferencing" parts of a teleconferencing stack, both the client and the servers, are also nigh unto commodities at this point (as Google open sourced the tech for almost all of the hard problems they solved for Hangouts), while figuring out how to better index file attachments people throw into chat discussions isn't exactly a solved problem.
Even by the low standards of web apps—I just learned about nvm today, WTH?—somehow Teams manages to be outright garbage. My office is a Microsoft shop and it actually makes me worried about what we’re going to do when the old C++ grognards at MS retire. What’s going to happen to Office, Outlook, etc?
Granted a decade is a long time and most of them are probably retired at this point but it's pretty reasonable that engineers working on those teams today worked directly with the people who built a lot of the original features for these applications.
So probably closer to something like 2.5 years removed in a lot of cases.
Microsoft, again 10 years ago, had more engineers spending their entire career at the company than I've seen at anywhere else by a fairly large margin. Especially a large tech one (maybe Google is getting there?).
Developers valuing their own experience over literally everything else, combined with them not understanding what they're doing and using way too many abstraction layers.
So yes, we are in it for bad.
I had to use it when working for a certain customer. It was chrome/chromium configured for accessing Teams, packed in a single archive/executable, if memory serves. They still managed to fuck it up in a way that after a single app crash, the bundled chromium was unable to connect to Microsoft services anymore (made no outgoing connections iirc). Fresh copy worked after spinning up a live system.
I don't know how they do it but Microsoft is great at fucking simple things up.
The answer is hidden in your question already. "not difficult" + "all these engineers" = overengineering.
Visual Studio - that's seems over-engineered (excellent app in many respects, but still...) The whole Lync thing felt over-engineered. MS has more than a few good examples of over-engineering, but Teams doesn't strike me as one of them.
I'm sure Teams has crashed on me at least once in using it for the past 3-4 years, but if so then it has been extremely rare - I wouldn't call it a crashy app. I've experienced performance issues with it, particularly when I've got my laptop hooked up to a larger monitor and I'm sharing my screen. There too though, I've learned to live with it and Teams works fine for me day to day.
However, I do see it as a lowest-common-denominator slack clone, and I agree with others here in that the overall Teams experience is lacking compared to slack.
It feels like MS is trying to do something different with it, but it hasn't worked. They keep pushing it so hard though that more and more people find themselves having to interact with it. Similarly, more and more shops pick it up because "nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft" and they're probably already neck-deep in Azure and O365 anyway.
Teams is not particularly buggy, it's not crash prone, it seems like it's missing some functionality, and other functionality seems like an afterthought (e.g., the wiki feature). It's just not a great app.
My current bugbear with Teams is it cannot open Office files in the native Office applications, which I have installed, by default. Sure, you can manually select "Open in..." each time and pick "Desktop application". But when you do "Change default", there are only two options: "Always open Word, PowerPoint and Excel files in (A) Teams, (B) Browser (default)". There's no option "(C) Desktop application"!
Come on guys, how hard can this be? What PM decided that option (C) should be left out? I mean, it's not as if the native Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications haven't been industry standards - and the basis for MS's success - for 30 years...
I’d need a year to overhaul AD/B2C and would probably want to hire a team of two more devs so we could get it right for all use cases. Even then it could be so broken that it’s almost impossible to fix in place.
Login is the one thing that I literally did once, on first app launch, and never thought about ever again.
I’m saying there’s plenty wrong with it, but the thing that would take the LONGEST to fix is Azure B2C, because that’s a whole beast in itself and is tightly coupled with all of the other MS products from Windows to Minecraft, to many many thousands of Web Apps that were unfortunate enough to have used it.
As a user who has multiple Microsoft accounts (due to years of contracting), I can’t log in to teams.
Edit: Teams has lots of problems, fixing AD/B2C is by far the hardest because it is a legacy pile of garbage used in thousands of production apps
I don't get all the hate for Teams. I work fully-remote on a medium sized team. We use Teams for one-one calls, team calls, presentations, screen-sharing, calls to external numbers and I've never had any problems. I run it on a Windows desktop and an Android phone. I've never had performance problems or crashes on either.
Some of the file-sharing/explorer stuff is a bit janky in terms of UI but I don't really use that. TBH it's all fairly seamless IMO.
At client, windows itself was unusable and people were blaming Microsoft... No it's the package team who did a shit job.
Code snippets are a pain to get right. The tilde key is the shortcut to get monospace fonts or code blocks, and it feels like I roll the die everytime I try to convert text to a code block.
Teleconferencing is also a major pain, where devices are not remembered for some reason. It's mostly ok, but every now and then it forgets my mic. This might have been fixed recently since it doesn't happen as often but it still happens.
Not to mention the hangs that comes up when switching between conversations.
Backticks are used for formatting code in Teams, not tildes. Surround in-line text in single backticks, or place three backticks on a new line to start a code block.
Pasting in teams is hilarious. I think when I last tried they were using contenteditable, as formatting that should not have carried over did so, along with the indentation going haywire on paste.
I agree on everything else though. The 'chat' part and the main UI are so janky and buggy. Even simple things like copy pasting or formatting code don't work the way you want it most of the time.
"too many cooks spoil the broth" is a saying for a reason. If hiring more people would solve every problem we'd have fewer problems. Every team trying to bolt their random features on software suites like this is usually why they end up in their bloated states to begin with.
If you wanted to fix software like this the only solution is usually to get rid of people and have some madman with a wrecking ball knock it over and rebuild it and that never happens at large oganisations.
Teams looks like a product that's stuck 5 years behind the market because everything is done with 15 program managers with briefcases full of wireframe diagrams.
Everything is make work by 15 managers of managers, pulling 600k, justifying their paycheques.
A chat program? Easy. A chat program with 270 million monthly active users? Slightly harder, but sure, still easy. A chat program with 270 million monthly active users that has to integrate the entire Microsoft ecosystem [sharepoint, outlook mail + calendar + contacts, yammer, O365 groups, etc] because that is what their enterprise customers demand? Slightly less easy. A chat program with 270 million monthly active users that really isn't just a chat program but rather an entire chat + teleconferencing + screen sharing + MS O365 app platform which has to deal with B2B AAD authentication cross organization, legacy on-premise Exchange servers setup in a hybrid environment, excessive levels of enterprise-controlled configuration and policies, compliance (Purview, IB, retention policies, etc), legal requirements needed to allow Teams to be used as part of the Microsoft 365 Government offering, and many many more niche requirements/features? I suspect it's hard.
I don't particularly like the software (and had many issues with it myself at my prior job) but MS Teams is not realistically _just_ a "chat program" that is easy to build. If you are a company just looking for a good chat experience, I have no idea why you would not use Slack. However, if you are one of the countless companies who have already bought into the entire Microsoft O365+outlook+AAD+sharepoint ecosystem, Teams is probably a good choice, as it is very seamlessly integrated.
Usually the day to day experience is really, really bad.
I wish they got rid of this js-on-the-desktop crap and rewrite it in a decent desktop language like C or C#.
As for C, maybe you meant C++? Kicking out a modern, complex, desktop, web/network-centric application in C is just begging for trouble. Particularly given all the headline grabbing research MS has done into how error prone manual memory management has been in their organization [0][1]
Actually, it doesn't really seem like a language issue, does it? You can have a terrible app in C/C++/Rust/Go/JS, any language, you name it. Even electron seems a little like a scapegoat - e.g., VSCode and (previously) Atom are examples of "js-on-the-desktop crap" that are surprisingly solid.
It's not the language that's the problem, and it's not (arguably) the underlying framework. The app just sucks. If Teams were written from the ground up in C# or C and had the same functionality (or lack of functionality), it would still suck. Teams, as a product, is just sub par compared to other offerings. Even so, it's good enough for the majority of Microsoft's enterprisey and/or locked-in customer base since it's so well integrated into everything else they offer.
[0] https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2019/07/18/we-need-a-safer-s...
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-70-percent-of-all-se...
That said, JS still has no place on the desktop in my opinion, and the world is full of Electron applications that have horrible performance. You can hack up an UI in bash too. But should you?
For products that _vertically_ suck, well, try Cisco WebEx.
Thank you for the lesson, though.
I feel like they had to try hard to make it this unintuitive and ugly.
Usually it is the magic formula to get this kind of quality, and Microsoft isn't imune to it.
For me, use of teams signals the impotence/incompetence of the CTO and that other poor technical and managerial choices will persist at the organisation.
Not everyone is keen on IRC, or having a relationship with Salesforce.
You pick your poison. It wouldn’t be my pick but I’m sure you’ve got your reasons not to pick mine or someone else’s
Because it has all the things that make win10 and office 365 bad but combined in a single program. 1. No border 2. Does not have input focus on the chat input even when window is active (this is a feature present in other "web" apps like Firefox, Chrome) The colors are ... 3. Themes are not themes but only some very limited color combinations which bring nothing new. 4. Transfering files is a pain. 5. Edit toolbar was made by an artist who hasn't seen other MS products before. "It has to be different". etc.
Teams reusing SharePoint instead of just using some simple file store means that basic operations like “let’s store some files for this team and let people collaborate” becomes buggy and weird.
I don't know why or how sharepoint has such a grip on MS. It's a super shitty experience to work with sharepoint.
I tried using Office 365 recently for a small side project after using Google apps for years.
Their email has like 5-10 messages come in every day about hotfixes, updates etc. Even after turning everything off, I still get a few emails from them every few days. Missed important emails in all that noise.
Outlook randomly decided to delete all my emails on my phone for some reason. I had to relogin and resync everything. Did not even realize this had happened and did not realize till a week later that I again missed a few important emails.
Lets not even get into Teams. Works only on Edge on a Desktop. Plus, starting a meeting seems to be rocket science. Still have not figured out how to blur the background in Teams.
Let me not even get started on Onedrive, the 1TB free storage is what drew me to try them out. Problem is 10MB took 1 hour to sync. How hard can syncing be...Google does it, Dropbox does it without any issues on Windows. But Microsoft cannot...
Sorry for the rant, but MS literally made me kill that side project and I am bitter about it. I just cannot figure out how it can be this bad and how MS is still surviving.
Teams/OneDrive is hot garbage.
To blur your background on Teams, go to background options while on a call. Click 'Blur'. Here are the steps if you get confused on the way:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-your-backg...
To start a meeting, either generate a meeting in the Calendar and it'll add a Teams call link in, or under the Calendar click 'Meet now' in the top right corner.
Also, unrelated. Teams on Ubuntu (for personal use) kicks me out after 12 hours and I need to sign in again. I don't know why.
They do have the ability to draw on other users screen, something I use much more.
....wait, what?? Teams, Webex, Zoom... Every other teleconference app can do it, so isn't this like admitting they're either not smart or lazy?
I would be totally fine with them removing video altogether and just keeping Huddles, but doing video without the remote control (and their video calls take an eternity to load, wtf?) is real weird
On one hand, I am pleasantly surprised to see that this page looks like basic HTML. It reminds me of the way the Internet looked like twenty years ago, which I am nostalgic for (no cookies, no trackers, no Javascr*pt, just basic text and images). On the other hand, I expected the status page of such a ubiquitous software suite as Office to look fancier, with colorful indicators everywhere, or like this: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/e7/e1/27/e7e1270a1f7504199614ffc32...
I wish more websites and apps looked like something out of Star Trek.
Whatever is happening in Teams it's its own special sauce of terrible, combined with a complete reluctance to shoot Teams in the head and start again.
Source: From Europe. Europe already might be in the same ballpark + I don’t forget about other continents.
This was about 9 PM EDT today, outside Philadelphia.
Should I count myself LUCKY?