Is this related to GTA6 being pushed to consoles a week prior to launch?
Would they ever admit it if that were the case.
I want to believe this is the cause. It'd be especially funny because businesses were already anticipating the productivity loss when GTA6 comes out, but now we have actual productivity loss because of this outage (and it's affecting people who were never going to play the game anyway, lol)
Sure, outlook.com is down, which is bad for everyone that chose to host their email there, I guess, but as an interesting side-effect, everyone with an on-premise Exchange server and "new Outlook" clients is affected as well.
Because, well, once upon a time there was Exchange Server and MAPI (the "Messaging API"), and that actually worked pretty well, and pretty much everyone started using it (or one of its EWS/ActiveSync offshoots), but then the Internet happened and ruined everything, but we got MAPI-over-HTTPS eventually, which by that time had grown so many warts that nobody at Microsoft really understood it anymore, so that got deprecated, even though, well, everyone and everything still uses it.
The new hotness was Azure-slash-Office-365, and that's where the "new Outlook" web interface lived and (sort-of) continues to live, and the on-prem customers got stuck with the "Exchange Subscription Edition", which was basically Exchange 2019 plus security hotfixes at extortionate rates, but with none of the new functionality.
And, since MAPI continued to be really, really hard even in the age of Copilot, access from the new hotness to the deprecated on-prem servers was implemented via IMAP (LOL), but force-proxied via the outlook.com cloud/clownshow.
Which is why, right now, many Microsoft customers that thought they were self-hosting their email are entirely down. Lessons might be learned here, but I sort-of doubt it...
Or, rather, it's acting like it usually does.
I want to believe this is the cause. It'd be especially funny because businesses were already anticipating the productivity loss when GTA6 comes out, but now we have actual productivity loss because of this outage (and it's affecting people who were never going to play the game anyway, lol)
Because, well, once upon a time there was Exchange Server and MAPI (the "Messaging API"), and that actually worked pretty well, and pretty much everyone started using it (or one of its EWS/ActiveSync offshoots), but then the Internet happened and ruined everything, but we got MAPI-over-HTTPS eventually, which by that time had grown so many warts that nobody at Microsoft really understood it anymore, so that got deprecated, even though, well, everyone and everything still uses it.
The new hotness was Azure-slash-Office-365, and that's where the "new Outlook" web interface lived and (sort-of) continues to live, and the on-prem customers got stuck with the "Exchange Subscription Edition", which was basically Exchange 2019 plus security hotfixes at extortionate rates, but with none of the new functionality.
And, since MAPI continued to be really, really hard even in the age of Copilot, access from the new hotness to the deprecated on-prem servers was implemented via IMAP (LOL), but force-proxied via the outlook.com cloud/clownshow.
Which is why, right now, many Microsoft customers that thought they were self-hosting their email are entirely down. Lessons might be learned here, but I sort-of doubt it...