Microsoft Teams went down around the world for over eight hours | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Teams went down around the world for over eight hours

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81 pointssaikatsg81 comments

Teams is probably the worst communications app I've ever been forced to use. Extremely slow, random crashes, almost impossible to organize chats in a useful way, and outages as the cherry on top. I would have thought that Microsoft would put more TLC into a core part of their enterprise offering.

> I would have thought that Microsoft would put more TLC into a core part of their enterprise offering.

which of their other pieces of software are any better?

PowerPoint is incredible! It lays out my slides much better than I can, and finds good images too!

A lot of their enterprise offerings are still pretty good. SQL Server, AD, Intune.

But Teams is really terrible. And the move to "New Teams" was handled very poorly too. I had hoped it would improve things, but it is basically the same with slightly less RAM usage.

>SQL Server

If you mean the DB server itself, sure. But for actually managing it, they've effectively killed further development of SSMS in favor of Azure Data Studio. And while Azure Data Studio is relatively fast and snappy, it's missing a lot of SSMS functionality. Meanwhile they refuse to implement a dark mode in SSMS despite it being the most requested feature for several years running now.

Excel was and is still the gold standard for everything that "doesn't quite require a database" and can be made by a regular corporate user in 5 minutes or less.

It did crappify somewhat in recent years, but still eons and mountains ahead of anything the competition put out.

MS's core product offering is the same as AWS being an already approved vendor to buy from, so no one has to go through approvals process for them again. Thus they are a defacto monopoly within large organizations. Who cares what the actual value add is it checks all the boxes required by law and they have a huge expense account to get the win.

Are you really surprised lol. MS solutions have always been half baked at best and always sold as part of Windows licensing for most enterprises.

Oh? You have out Windows 11 Pro/Enterprise for 1000+ licenses. We will throw in O365 for a year to get the org fully hooked.

Oh, need windows Active Directory as well? We can add 200 licenses with your existing windows licenses for 1-2 years.

(2 years later) oh your org is downsizing the internal ad sys admins? Don’t worry we got you covered with Azure AD!! Just cough up $250K every quarter. That’s like 1 senior SDE!!1

Oh hey we also have Windows VDIs, Azure Cloud, and other shit. Get into our walled garden. Never leave.

Half baked at best describes almost all tech solutions out there if we are being honest. Some of the products Microsoft puts out are best in class. It's just what you get with an org that size. There's going to be a wide range of quality imho.

Teams does seem to be on a whole new level of terrible though.

The weird part is that the video conferencing is excellent compared to the equivalents of zoom and Google.

My entire computer can be dying due to intensive cpu load and the teams call is fine. Zoom causes the cpu load. Google doesn't have basic controls.

I'm sure slack is fine but I've never seen anybody use it for external meetings.

It can be great, but I've noticed lag during screen sharing. Other colleagues have noticed it too.

Even so... it's better than slack for audio/video and my organization uses teams as primary for calls and slack for text communications(group chats, channels, dms)

I mean, they make the OS, they can force it to give teams top priority over all your other lagging shit lol.

Zoom does all sorts of audio processing on the client that does wonders for participants in noisy environments.

Teams only just recently got to that level (like, in the last half of last year)

My understanding is that they bundled it in so conveniently that it’s somewhat of a default. They probably don’t have to care because the average company isn’t about to do an entire slack deployment and integration into their purely MS ecosystem

accurate, I work for a company that uses a bunch of Microsoft products. it’s apparently a good deal from a financial perspective and is popular in the public sector because of the easy integration for non-technical users. alas, you get what you pay for.

> Teams is probably the worst communications app I've ever been forced to use.

Not to pile onto MS Teams, but it's by far the most amateur hour system I ever had the displeasure of being forced to use.

I feel they even managed to botch their transition from Teams Classic. Official docs were out of sync with the app's transition, whole features were missing, some features were suddenly only made available to pro users. What a mess.

Make no mistake: the problems with MS Teams are not technical. It's product design and management. It felt like a rush job where everyone involved failed to get their stuff out, product managers felt the mess was acceptable, and the senior manager still made the call to release anyway.

MS Teams is a mess for the ages.

I apologize for venting like this but I had multiple critical meetings being postponed and rescheduled because MS Teams failed to work in creative ways. This definitely did not happen with Zoom or Google Meet or Slack.

Atlassian's HipChat was pretty on par with Teams.

I really don’t grok all the random chats I get notified for. I was in a meeting two months ago, and there’s still a chat getting updates in my feed. So many random auto generated chat groups that linger that I have to prune and wonder “will I regret deleting this”.

I prefer the subscribed channel where I make an intentional choice, and everything else is ephemeral.

Off topic, but does anyone understand what's going on with the 'new' version which is entitled "Microsoft Teams (Work and School)", such that the app name on MacOS (in the menu bar!) is that?

I assume it's to disambiguate it from the 'classic' version, but seems like an odd name to use?

I'd +1 on how bad Teams is in general: a few weeks ago I got a popup in it saying "We've made teams even better!", and I thought "I bet you haven't".

Does anyone know if MS use it themselves?

I took that to be mobile app store spam tactics bleeding over into the desktop app stores (hardly the first, but certainly a prominent app from a major developer stooping to new lows - hmm, this is MS, maybe I should just say 'different lows').

> Does anyone know if MS use it themselves?

Yes, extensively.

I've worked in the Teams org at Microsoft in a past life. The tl;dr is that Teams was actually not a core offering for Microsoft and barely anyone outside Microsoft even knew about it before COVID. It was just never designed for the sheer scale, reliability, and feature velocity requirements that were thrust upon it after COVID began.

That’s understandable, but why then they seem to operate under the same premises still?

We are in the post COVID years now and more and more organizations are using it today.

Is it accurate to say they have no incentive to improve, given their dominance in the enterprise space and the complicity of some finance/IT departments into forcing it on their employees given the cost savings and the convenience?

Microsoft does not compensate its employees well relative to its peers by a significant margin.

>Teams was actually not a core offering for Microsoft

Ummm .. Lync / SkypeForBusiness / Teams has been Microsoft's core communication product for long over a decade now.

It has always been part of their basic/essential packages because they know that everyone needs a communication platform.

How you managed to work at Microsoft on Teams and think that nobody knows about it, is a bit astounding.

Teams was a product for 3 years before Covid. A large amount of companies had been running it for 1-2 years at that point.

The idea that Microsoft built Teams as a Skype for Business replacement, but didn't design for scale or reliability is an absurd statement.

----

Either you are

(1) lying

or two

(2) worked on teams but had no understanding of the product or userbase.

... which kind of does sounds like how teams might have been built

It was evident from the complete disregard for scalability and amateurish dev and ops processes that Teams was not regarded as a serious project right until COVID began and the org pretty much spent all of 2020 fighting fires to keep up with the pressure. In the years that followed, the org likely quadrupled in size to keep up.

Teams was very much the sleepy rest-and-vest corner of the company that people transferred into to quiet-retire. Teams is not just a reskinning/re-clienting of SfB's backend. They are separate systems.

You are conflating two separate things.

We all know the code and development direction in teams is lacking. This is one problem.

Microsoft scrambling around COVID times with Teams had more to do with the load / demand / capturing market share, than anything else.

SfB stopped releasing in 2018, 2021 it was lights out no matter what .. everyone was already moving to Teams.

Trying to pretend that their main communication platform is not a "core offering" when it is the definition of one of their core offerings makes no sense.

And trying to say nobody knew about it, when everyone knew about it also makes no sense.

SfB was dead by the time covid started. Where do you think these people migrated to?

Many companies with O365 used other platforms for voice and chat. Otherwise products like Webex and Zoom would've had zero market share since virtually everybody who pays taxes has an O365 (thus, Teams) subscription.

Also consider, Teams for Education as a market segment basically didn't exist before COVID.

My point is, many organization had a Teams license but never really pay attention to it until COVID. Which was another problem for Microsoft because although op costs for Teams went up like a hockey stick, they weren't monetizing that growth until a bit later.

Agreed. Teams on the web for my company continually has issues with random reloads. I traced it down thinking the problems has to do with an authentication server not sending CORS headers when requested, because each time the problem happened, there was a faulty request. I'd expect there is even some monitoring on it, but no, it continues to happen. The Windows application seems to get the most love anyway. I have to fumble around this, running for most stuff the Windows application in a Virtual desktop, but since the IT disallows sharing screens, have to switch to that terrible web version to share, hoping it will not crash in the middle of calls (which it would constantly do)

Also, the "new Teams" is missing functionality. It lost the auto-transcribe feature. Go figure.

Totally amateur hour work. I tried once to get my teammates to use Slack, but it's hard to adjust. Slack ain't perfect, but it just works in so many ways that Teams barely hangs on with.

I find it hard to believe CORS is the root cause. It’s more likely that the server returns an error response and _that_ response doesn’t include the CORS headers.

You are probably right. However, if I remember correctly (it's been awhile), it was one of them that didn't return a CORS header, but a 200 status, but that led to a number of requests that failed. But regardless, as an SPA, the Teams application is not resilient to it.

Teams truly is terrible. The example I always give:

There is absolutely 0 feedback to show a speaker when their mic is actively transmitting. When anyone else in a call speaks, a ring around their avatar lights up to show you who is speaking. When you speak? Nada. Technically, you can open the settings menu and there is a mic level bar there... but it's not in the standard view.

As far as I've seen, Teams is the only chat app that can't get this right. Not only does it increase the rate of people trying to talk while still on mute, it gives you no way of knowing if sounds in your environment are transmitting to the meeting and disrupting everyone else.

My favorite (more minor) issue to harp on is the lack of rebindable keybinds. Paste without formatting is Ctrl+Shift+V, while make a phone call to the other person is Ctrl+Shift+C. After enough accidental calls (fortunately my teammate was very understanding) I had to just install Microsoft PowerToys to override the default keybind.

An app where you can be in a meeting, listening to audio, and watching a shared screen, and the app says you lost access to the chat...

A presentation app where you can't freeze the screen share, a feature requested by hundreds of users 6 or 7 years ago...

It's use should be a firing offense.

"No longer has access to chat" - https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/no-lon...

"Freeze screen sharing" - https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/freeze...

I'm surprised that the general sentiment here is that Teams is terrible. I've been using it for a very long time and have had almost zero issue with it. I prefer it in most cases.

We are currently moving from Teams to Slack at my workplace and I miss the ability to view my full calendar, join meetings, schedule meetings, share common files, and call others all from one application.

Is there another application that does all that Teams does but better?

Typically, people who’ve had a good time with a product don’t write about it as much as people who’ve had a bad time. Anger motivates venting whereas being satisfied with the product doesn’t create emotions that compel people as strongly to share. For this reason, I believe samples of feedback such as this online forum are often poor indicators of the general experience, as is true with many forms of feedback. In fact, I have a generally positive impression of Teams, and I wasn’t planning to write anything until I saw your comment.

Teams is truly disgusting. It is the prime example of what happens to software if you just keep stuffing features into it instead of fixing at least some existing problems. I bet this codebase has tons of "legacy" code already.

I also wonder.. do they have a "UX" team? If so what are these people doing? The usability is abysmal.

We use Slack and Teams at my workplace and regarding chat Slack is lightyears ahead. Sadly the company wants to force more and more people off of Slack and into using Teams.

Microsoft Teams is long been terrible and gets worse every year. Every customer I work with that uses Teams, I loath working with or for. It's been terrible since it was Office Communicator, then Lync, Skype for Business, and now Teams as they rebrand every few years trying to remove the old stink.

They had a Linux client for a while, but it never worked right, and still can't figure out which audio device to use, or allow you to save a setting of which one to prefer. Every call, when they work, is a scramble to figure out where your audio is routing if you happen to have multiple sound cards. Now they've even done away with the Linux client and tell you to just use the web, which guess what - has even more dysfunction, and doesn't work most of the time either. This doesn't even include the 95% of complaints that come from native Windows users, let alone the other 3rd rate citizen, Apple Mac's.

The only reason people use teams is Microsoft gives it away as the "first hit" with your enterprise licenses, and what greedy corporation doesn't enjoy free. They could pay for a good solution like Slack, but does relic management use web chat to see any value? If they're old, probably not, so free is better than not.

Now the really scary thing is enterprises are now like "we can get rid of our phones and use Teams!", when Teams _still_doesn't_work_for_everyone_. I'm waiting for the day when someone dies because they couldn't find their phone or log into their PC to start a teams call for 911, or figure out audio routing.

I've actually quit jobs and customers because OCS/Lync/Teams has made my life hell trying to work or even consult for organizations. I can't help them if they can't even help themselves to not do stupid things like use the worst common denominator of enterprise communications.

Nothing will happen, so why should Microsoft care?

They already have one of the worst usability experiences across conventionally used instant messenger/VOIP software.

This is proof that its very easy for one monopoly to create another.

It’s such a depressing product that has become an industry standard. Shame on all of us.

Its the most awful „chat“ program I‘ve ever used. Especially the horrible linux support is a shame.

for me the browser version worked fine on all os, nothing fancy,but get the job done

Except it doesn't work on Firefox... or Safari.

(FD: it didn't work on either last I checked, which was 4 months ago because I migrated my org off Teams 4 months ago;; I'm not willing to check if thats changed, but not having support for years is equally unacceptable, I don't care if they've improved in your eyes now--- TL;DR: inb4 "IT WORKS NOW")

At least the Linux community is steeping up to do the work Microsoft doesn't want to.

https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux

I use it and it's nice, but as long as it points to web teams, it will inherit all the instability issues I have had with Teams, just without anyway to easily back out of it, unlike a regular browser.

I would think linux support is nowhere on their list of priorities.

There is no Linux support. The desktop app got discontinued at least a year ago.

What’s the problem with it? It seems like one of the better faster improving products I use on a daily basis.

there's that hilarious video where they boast the complete rewrite only takes 9 seconds to open and only 1.2 seconds to switch chats

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CT7nnXej2K4

what is it even doing? both should be instant

mIRC opened instantly on a 1995 PC

Lol remember when Microsoft tried to re-invent IRC in the 90s? How long has Microsoft been failing at IRC now (which is basically what web chat is)

Microsoft excels only at stealing existing tech, doing a horrible job at it, rebranding it as their own and then engaging in predatory litigation to try to steal the rights to it. I mean they aren't the only ones who do that, but at least make it better in some way

Disagree. ComicChat was a great product, and a great way to introduce non-tech people to IRC.

> there's that hilarious video

It’s was just painful, and then I saw that the account holder is Microsoft. Is this correct?

That’s like a messed up version of Apple’s ‘it’s 75% faster’ graphs but with more of your time wasted watching a video showing how bad they were and and still are.

Try a call with several participants where one has a low speed connection.

Try open a Word doc. The layout is screwed, or is it? Online Word, the app and Teams all show it differently.

Try drag and drop a document onto it on a Mac - that’s broken (may have been fixed in last update).

Try have the app respond in less than 3 seconds after a click, on a gigabit connection.

Try download a large folder from Teams. Good luck - it will crap out.

Every day is another paper cut. I don’t have a better platform to go to but I do wonder if a network share and any other chat app would replace Teams, and we are looking into that.

Let's see...

1) Slow UI. Doesn't always show the latest thing I've typed unless I leave the chat and come back to it.

2) Constantly nags me that I am muted. Close the window and it pops up another one.

3) Notifies me of completely irrelevant things like a person was added to a meeting as if it was a chat message.

4) Meetings and calling seem to rely on some kind of peer to peer system that can break horribly with out anyway to diagnose the issue (e.g. works differently depending on how you access a meeting or call).

Last time I checked google meet was the only meeting platform where I could join a meeting without creating an account and also it works natively in Firefox on linux.

Everything else either requires installing an app, using a browser other than firefox, or making an account.

I agree, Google Meet works well with no account.

It has a weird habit of grabbing my phone microphone when I join from my laptop, but other than that, it’s good.

Brave's video chat service works for me in that situation, but i suppose you’re probably referring to just the largest players.

jitsi is also excellent, and its FOSS too.

Except that it is completely unreliable, where there's always 1 or 2 users who it doesn't work for and drops steams forcing all to switch to something else, and also codebase is a total mess of tightly coupled spaghetti code hacks. Dont recommend anyone waste their time on trying to use it.

Zoom also does not require an account nor does it require installing their software, although they try to hide that feature.

This isn't a surprise from an organisation that opened a ticket on the FFmpeg tracker asking volunteers for free "high priority" support:

https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/10341#comment:4

(And no one noticed for the first few hours)

It wasn't completely out. We were using it all day yesterday for video and.phone conferences without issue. Chats were slow and image loading was hit or miss.

It's funny you say that, because it's true. I didn't notice. A contractor called and we tried setting up a Teams meeting so he could show me some stuff, and it just didn't work. So we quickly switched over to another tool that he uses for showing his screen, and I put my phone in "speaker" mode. It never occurred to either of us that Teams had actually gone down. Each of us assumed it was our IT.

> Each of us assumed it was our IT

It sort of was, they chose Teams. I say this as someone who uses Teams and could probably get us moving away from it but the inertia is real.

We were among the companies that switched from Slack to Teams. Slack was absolutely overflowing with work activity, side chats, a few random channels. Hundreds if not thousands a day.

Everyone hates Teams so much they only seem to use it as absolute last resort. I see about 10 total messages a day, if that. So yeah, it took us a long time to realize it was even down.

Has the reduced chatter helped, or hindered work?

For me, hindered. We're a remote company, and rather silod at that, so watching chats helped me see who does what, things going on, even help where I could.

With Teams it just feels cold and lonely, to be honest.

I'd say if everyone knew everything, and just wanted to code all day, it probably would have helped work as there is less random chatter too. But I'm not sure that's ever realistic for a company.

That is a joke normally used for Azure...

Whenever I think of MS Teams, I'm reminded of Paul Virilio's research on dromology ("speed as a weapon") and how the inhibition of speed (productivity in this case) can be a weapon too, whether intended as such or not.

This is an interesting conjecture. It could be a cunning Microsoft competitive strategy.

They convince cost-sensitive IT infrastructure groups in other businesses to use Teams by offering it for free, reducing company productivity massively, hobbling product development.

Meanwhile, Microsoft adopt some other pay messaging/video service internally, accelerate product development 10x, become insanely competitive in a whole host of new markets rapidly.

I'd love to see whether and by how much this event correlated with a significant increase in worker productivity.

My company is thinking of transitioning from Zoom to Teams in 2025. Looks like we will have meeting free days

We had to use Teams with our partners in China(long story), and the macOS app doesn’t even support FIDO keys. Had to ask IT for an exception to use TOTPs on my account.

Apple's App Store Connect was also down on Friday and that was much more personally obnoxious. At least with Teams down I got a free afternoon of maker time!

Ah, Teams. Wouldn't let me join meetings when I wasnt in the office, but worked when I was in the office. Great remote collaboration tool!

I finally figured out how to fix it a few days ago (weird interaction with the Citrix client). Then it all stopped working again.

I just put it down to being an incredibly flaky app. Didn't occur to me that it had actually gone down.

Dupe with no new information:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39146385

(Though I'm betting there's a followup in a week or two where they admit that it was once again a DDoS attack they were unable to mitigate.)

Our work uses Zoom, but for one specific project I have to use Teams to talk with a government sponsor. Every single meeting without fail I get disconnected at exactly the 18 minute mark past start.

How could you tell? Teams is awful and fails to work almost every time.

Was ok until they locked screen share recording behind office 365 settings. Haven’t been able to get it to work despite all the settings being correct.

Satya's genius strikes again

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