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Comment by nerdjon | Hacker News Reader

What I find most interesting about this is how long it took to see reporting on this issue, unlike what I remember the reporting on Slack being down 5 or 6 years ago that I could fairly reliably find somewhere that said it was down.

Has how we used these tools just changed? They are so janky in the first place that them being "down" is questionably different?

Just seems weird.

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Personally, I just expect Teams to be janky. At least where I work, I don't think that a day goes by that it doesn't glitch out in one way or another.

Yeah, I noticed Teams messages being out of order (and being re-incorrectly-ordered multiple times) this morning and didn't think anything of it. I hadn't seen that particular bug before but it didn't stand out from the normal background jank.

That's my experience too. This outage seemed like the same jank I see every day. It just took me longer to realize it's jankier than usual.

Spot on analysis. It's a broken product, most of the time, for me.

The place I work at now uses Teams, and I legitimately didn't notice anything amiss.

- Channels randomly taking several minutes to load or outright refusing to load? Normal

- Calls dropping on a fast, stable ethernet connection? Normal

- Messages not sending, or appearing to send but silently never arriving/being dropped upon arrival? Normal

- Messages double- and triple-sending? Normal

- Messages being sent out-of-order? Normal

- Messages sending extremely slowly? Normal

- Attachments not loading? Normal

- Teams deciding logging in is just too difficult and I have to restart it at least once? Normal

I remember when I got an email today about an apparently outage describing all of the above (minus the call instability), I was like "wait, it's not supposed to be like this?"

And now that I type this out, especially having used Slack in the past, I realize what an indictment of Teams that is. (But I've also worked at a place that used Lync/Skype for Business/whatever they're calling it now, and it still manages to be pleasant compared to that mess. Though I won't give MS any credit there; the bar was on the floor, and they managed to avoid tripping over it.)

And yet companies don't mind the extremely obvious loss of productivity this causes. They also don't mind that it makes them look unprofessional. At all.

I've seen townhall meetings where 200+ FTE where sitting around waiting for Teams to stop glitching for like 10 minutes. And after they go back to their desk for real work, the glitching continues.

"innovation"

My previous employer forced us to use a Hip hat instance. It was legitimately hell, deleting history randomly and just atrocious. Using Teams now (switched jobs) it legitimately feels mystical in comparison.

I can't help but imagine what it'll feel like if you find a job that uses Slack.

I use Slack outside work, and it's less buggy than Teams but the feature count is dramatically lower. Maybe as I use it mostly with non-technical groups. Feels 'fine' but people seem to clamor for Discord.

My job use Slack and I find it quite frustrating. The UI could definitively need some work. Seems like they change the UI now and then but it doesn't really make it easier for me.

Every week I face a new issue with Teams because every week MS will push a silent update which will invariably fix one thing but break another.

The best is when those “silent updates” restart Teams while you are in the middle of using it.

Teams is a pile of junk.

It crashes randomly. It cuts off text when you start typing. It is terrible.

A million times this. Things seemed more broken than usual in Teams for me today like image attachments not working and such. I just figured it was Teams being Teams until someone informed me there was a service outage degrading things. That’s how low the bar is.

My employer uses Teams and it is an extremely reliable productivity killer.

People seem much harsher on Slack, for some reason. Sometimes being the better product just means people notice when it's broken.

Is there a term for how people just kind of acclimatise to a broken, buggy tool, and don’t realise when it’s extra broken?

A sort of software Stockholm syndrome?

Microsoft Syndrome

Clippyitis

I think (in general) Slack has been more open to automations and integrations, so entire workflows rest on it.

Teams is catching up in this respect, but fewer people rely on it beyond day-to-day communication. Not that it's not important, but maybe just not as critical to things beyond person-to-person comms.

I disagree a bit: companies use it partly because it integrates with SharePoint, so a team can have a SharePoint folder easily. That often breaks down, because who needs access to that folder almost never maps to the team members, but it's enough to sell it to people to get their foot in the door, and after that they accept the hideous pain of changing it.

When I see the Microsoft logo, I always lower my expectations accordingly.

Teams is typically a free product with an MSFT EA.

Teams is always pretty bad, I noticed slightly worse service/message duplication/call drops today.

If it weren't for MS being a monopoly I doubt we'd use it

How is MS a monopoly when it comes to workspace tools? Seems to me there are plenty of alternatives and I am lucky enough that I never had to use it at work.

If your org uses Microsoft products, typically a Teams license is baked in (or at least was at some point). So when it comes to choosing a better tool vs Teams it is an easy decision for the bean counters - we're already paying for Teams, let's just use it.

For sure - maybe I read GP in bad faith, but I understood it as “we have to choose Teams in my org because it’s a monopoly”

Few things frustrate me more than being forced into an unproductive situation - completely kills my motivation.

I'm sure I could've worded it better, but the bottom line is we are an org that uses Microsoft - Azure, C#, etc.

Other options had no shot

I think it was because it was a widespread problem or did not appear that way. Teams for our company were mostly working.

I think it was because most people are used to Teams being an application with a poor experience, so a widespread degradation in service just looks like what people normally expect from Teams.

I know in the orgs that I work with, everyone today blamed any problems on Teams being a crappy application. No one thought twice about it being something more than that.

This was my experience. Teams was slow and functioning badly this morning, but it wasn't until someone else said they were also not seeing images that I realized it wasn't just typical jank. Teams is just not good to use in the first place so it doesn't occur to me to think I should check for outages whenever I have a problem.

I think especially with how Teams responded to this problem. It wasn't saying it couldn't connect or anything.

I had a few symptoms:

First teams froze my entire computer when I started it when it couldn't connect.

Then it finally loaded and a message I sent would appear in the preview on the left but not actually in the chat window (the preview where it shows the name list of chats I have).

Then messages would just sit with that circle sending, but I would receive messages occasionally.

A simple "can't connect" would have gone a long way.

Today was the first day, in the ~4 months that we've been using Teams and MS365 for our company, that anyone noticed an actual outage. I got an email about it from a colleague and they weren't aware of the outage (I wouldn't expect them to, this team is very non-technical). So I get to explain these types of things next week, that we can't really "fix" these issues, they will happen though.

But yea, Teams is janky. I wish I could say it was the worst thing I experienced at work, but, alas, that remains a wish and a dream.

This is because of the decline in use of Twitter. When a major platform went down, there was always a notable and reliable surge in tweets on that topic. Tech reporters had running searches that would surface such surges immediately.

Now tech folks are more dispersed across several social media platforms so it’s harder to see trends.

I didn't even look at HN because our yammer page had a post within a few minutes with a description of the issue, an ETA for a fix, and a time for a next update.

I don't know if the speed of a technical status update is related to how much we pay to MS, but it definitely feels that way.

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