Microsoft is garbage

I've had people over the last few days asking me if I can fix issues they're having due to:

But 100,000 lemmings can't be wrong!

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• KSI@home KOI8 Net < > The impossible we do immediately. *
• Las Vegas NV, USA < > Miracles require 24-hour notice. *

Microsoft evolves it's software and is cursed with backwards compatibility. It works reasonably well pretty much all the time.

If they could start off with a clean slate they could probably do better. Being a market leader creates problems for product development.

I'm biased. A couple of Australian friends work for the company, and one of them has just moved to Seattle to work at the headquarters at Redmond (with her cats). Her father and uncle work for Microsoft in Australia and I've known them since they were kids.

You would seem to have a point!

Their entire global email service and Teams is belly up this morning :( (looks like it failed here shortly after 11pm GMT from my logs)

Amazing how many major companies rely on it exclusively with no provision for a fall back option when there is a cloudburst.

Been a *long* while since there was a serious Friday 13th outage. Friday 13th viruses used to be a big thing in the 80's and 90's.

Unclear at this stage it if is human stupidity inside MS that broke their systems or malevolent external malware that is responsible.

Either seems equally likely to me ;-)

Friday the 13th is more significant for humans than for hardware. The timing does suggest malevolent external malware.

Coincident with the announcement of 60,000 additional layoffs?

Estimates of damage are running into the billions $$$ already.

I wonder what Microsoft uses internally. Surely not Office or Outlook, or they would realize how buggy and frustrating it all is.

Linux and gmail?

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I use Windows only for local workstations and local network file sharing and some remote desktop (restricted to known IPs) with file sharing over that. For anything else, Linux and my own email server works fine for me. On a host which doesn't have every other IP listed in

It's all very easy to test in either Hyper-V or Proxmox.

And all my data is here under my control and my control only. So are the off-site backups which aren't far away.

I also have a download service using links so I can easily get information I might need when I'm away and be independent of email attachment size limits. Email attachments are a bad idea anyway.

I use Windows (7x64) for CAD/EDA, DTP, multimedia, non-linear editing, ERDs, symbolic math, plotting, etc.

Basically, anything where there is a heavy GUI involvement.

I use NetBSD (and SLOWARIS) to host my software development tools, VCS, DBMS, etc. And, all of the "network services". Things that tend to be more text-based. FreeBSD for all of my file servers.

Of course, I can access any machine (Windows, *BSD) from any other machine with a combination of TELNET/SSH, RDP/VNC/X. And, can access VMs from any machine via a browser interface, if push comes to shove (obviously not good for playing full motion video!)

I don't have *any* out-facing services as I have no desire to defend them. I rely on numerous "free" email and cloud accounts for exchanging "normal" content with the world. And, a "stealth server" that colleagues can use to access the current software repository (which is a low frequency, low bandwidth use).

Time spent on IT is time wasted, IMO. So, I try to adopt practices that let me drive that to zero.

That should be a given. I long ago abandoned RAID and ZFS as their administrative costs are too high (do a dry run trying to rebuild an array/pool and see if you get anything else done that day!) Instead, I keep multiple copies of files (different spindles and containers) and have a database that indexes where each is located. So, if *a* file gets corrupted, I can find all copies of it wherever they may be located.

I have far too much to backup offsite (hundreds of terabytes -- maybe even a petabyte, by now!). But, you can typically whittle down what is "important" and "essential" to a small, portable USB drive that you can have a friend store in a desk drawer for you.

I have an email portal that lets colleagues request files (if they don't want to deal with the stealth server) from my repository. It fetches the requested files, wraps them into a gzip'd tarball and emails them as an attachment.

For sources, this works well as attachments tend to end up reasonably small.

I have email and other services hosted externally with non-critical out facing servers locally. This is mostly because I like to see what gets thrown at them and from where.

I have some free email accounts too but I'm not dependent on them.

That's understandable as it's true it can take a lot of time but as we all know you can't just install an out facing server of any kind and then forget about it. I find that

(S.

Even impressive backwards compatibility is not a valid excuse for forcing users to use the Internet instead of a local word processor. (S.

Martin Brown <'''newspam'''@Nonad.co.UK> wrote: |---------------------------------------------------------------------| |"Unclear at this stage it if is human stupidity inside MS that broke | |their systems or malevolent external malware that is responsible. | | | |Either seems equally likely to me ;-)" | |---------------------------------------------------------------------|

Morons who choose Microsoft are responsible. All the messes up Microsoft makes since more than forty years ago are not external malware. (S.

Bill Sloman snipped-for-privacy@IEEE.org wrote: |-----------------------------------------------------------------------| |"Friday the 13th is more significant for humans than for hardware. The | |timing does suggest malevolent external malware." | |-----------------------------------------------------------------------|

I disagree. Various sources reported that Microsoft so messed up during this week since before Friday. LinkedIn is even buggier during this season long before this week than during Summer 2026. (S.

They could have, but Ballmer left it to Google. Not that I have any wish to use Google services any more than I have to.

Although MickeySoft are so far insisting that it is overloading and not as a result of a cyber attack (which means it is employee incompetence).

What they actually mean is that it is so well disguised that they cannot tell how it happened and it is so convenient to blame fallible humans.

I suspect that an AI gone rogue might well be behind this attack - Friday 13th is *so* retro black hat stuff that it is hard to believe that the date when this occurred is a coincidence. Skynet here we come! ;-)

The biggest dis-service Microsoft did to the World was to mix up e-mail and web browsing - that is what opened the door to viruses. By offering their browser/e-mailer free, they ensured a large enough population of victims to guarantee that viruses would propagate easily.

And why does Outlook auto-correct MHz to Mhz as I type it, and then instantly flag that as a spelling error?

I take the opposite approach: I don't want to even be aware of these things! The email providers do an *amazing* job keeping spam out of my mbox's so why not let them keep doing that?

Our cellphones have SMS disabled (at the provider!). Our home phone is answered by an "attendant" -- which results in all sorts of folks abandoning the call (political season we logged almost 300 "abandoned calls" as folks realized they weren't going to get to talk to "occupant"). Our important snailmail goes to a "box" -- so anything coming to the house is trash.

"Don't bother us!"

I have dozens (aliased to a few "real" accounts) so I can give an email address to someone who insists on having it -- and then delete it. Handy for the sites that insist on contact info before they will provide you with information.

The one "stealth" box that I have runs *no* services other than providing access to the repository. So, even if you somehow manage to get it to talk to you, there's nothing that it is willing to *do* for you.

This just to save me the trouble of acting as a "clerk" for my colleagues; "Get it yourself!"