I especially loved their status page during the outage:
current health
CRM No issues
Exchange No issues
Identity Service No issues
Lync No issues
Office 365 Portal No issues
Office Subscription No issues
Rights Management Service No issues
SharePoint No issues
Yup, it's pretty broken, though it is still up some places.
Outlook.com:
Grapevine TX, United States (bigguy.gte.net) - Down
Sacramento CA, United States (CalWeb) - Down
Providence RI, United States (Verizon) - Down
Pasadena CA, United States (Mindspring) - Down
Mountain View CA, United States (Google) - Up
Vancouver BC, Canada (Radiant) - Down
Recife, Brazil (Hotlink Internet) - Down
London, United Kingdom (Legend Comm) - Down
Lille, France (Nordnet) - Down
Merzig Saarland, Germany (Probe Networks) - Up
Milan, Italy (BT Italy) - Down
Ankara, Turkey (TTNET) - Down
St. Petersburg, Russia (Uni of Tech & Design) - Up
Karachi, Pakistan (Supernet) - Down
Delhi, India (Tikona Infinet) - Down
Bangkok, Thailand (TOT) - Down
Petaling Jaya, Malaysia (Clear-Comm) - Down
Beijing, China (China Unicom) - Down
Sydney NSW, Australia (Exetel) - Down
Collingwood VIC, Australia (Pacific Internet) - Down
Auckland, New Zealand (ICONZ) - Down
It depends on what your local DNS has cached. Also, I’m finding that 1 out of 5 of their DNS servers is still responding from my location (not too far from Vancouver).
Based on what I have heard, the issue was caused by a bad active directory GPO that caused firewall rules to refuse DNS requests. Neither outlook/xbox/etc would have had any control over it.
I heard that the issue has since been solved internally from 4.30 PST, though DNS changes often take time to propagate externally, taking TTL settings and ISP caches into consideration.
And that's why I run my own mail server nowadays. Privacy, control over data, and at least I'm responsible for my own downtime without impacting more than a few people. Decentralisation for the win, in my opinion.
Also credits to my ISP for allowing hosting of my own server, running native IPv6 and of course opening port 25. Xs4all is a really cool ISP to have in the Netherlands :)
Maybe if Microsoft wasn't wasting its time trying to spread slurs about competitors, it could actually spend that time creating interesting software, building viable new products, and making sure it doesn't f*ck up its own DNS records. Or maybe someone's making that point for them ...
Yes, ALL the developers (judging by your comment, who are no doubt better coders than you) at Microsoft are working on the new marketing campaign. Jesus christ, viable new products, perhaps they should just start making beer delivery apps on the rails stack, that'll prove themselves right? That 4chan thread the other day was exactly about guys like you.
Fair point. My original comment was poorly worded; I obviously didn't mean to imply any of the things you're claiming here. I merely (over)reacted out of extreme frustration with a marketing campaign that I can barely believe someone at Microsoft sanctioned. Whatever any of us think of Microsoft (I'm obviously not their biggest fan), you have to admit that this is a low, LOW move, and something that probably never would have happened were Bill Gates still in charge.
REDMOND, Wash. — October 24, 2013 — Microsoft Corp. today announced revenue of $18.53 billion for the quarter ended September 30, 2013. Gross margin, operating income, net income, and diluted earnings per share for the quarter were $13.42 billion, $6.33 billion, $5.24 billion, and $0.62 per share.
I chuckle at how a lot of anti-MS zealots are absolutely mystified at how non-anti-MS simply can possibly be so delusional.
Wow, didn't expect they were selling merchandise. This is a new low even for Microsoft. Microsoft were never considered to be a company which puts ethics over money, and this just shows that they are jealous. They would do worse if they were in Google's place.
But selling merchandise? Come on, really! Is there at least one person in the world who could use these items and make it seem like they are making a fair point?
Jealous? To me it shows aggressive brand management. I've never really seen Microsoft as a company above ribbing on competitors. Why is it even a bad thing? Apple did it against PC for like a decade.
Most aggressive marketing/brand management generally doesn't involve selling products saying "[competitor] is bad and evil!!!"
Commercials sometimes, sure, but not wearable merchandise. I think it makes Microsoft seem quite petty, especially since they're trying to coin a whole new word out of it ("Scroogled").
Apple had a point, that they were cooler. They were saying, "hey, we are different". How does what Microsoft's saying about Google not apply to it? MS doesn't care about your privacy any more than Google. With the Snowden revelations and all, they have no case to make.
I disagree. Microsoft is a company who makes most of their money selling software, and hardware and services play a small part. They do almost no advertising.
Google is a company who derives about 99% of its revenue directly from its advertising business, of which utilizing user data from free services is the crux of the data-based approach that drives their success.
It seems like false equivalence to me. Same reason why I trust Apple way more than Google with data. Because Apple makes all their money on the hardware, not on the future use of your data for advertising purposes.
I got a 404 error on my signup for Azure instead of the "completed order" landing page. Then I got about a dozen phone calls asking me how my experience went with the service stuck in some half setup state.
What a bad time for this to happen for Microsoft. It's almost too badly timed for it to be a coincidence, if I were an attacker with access to Microsoft's DNS' this would be the perfect time to launch an attack.
This probably explains an error we were getting on a Node.js app running on Azure websites. Simply creating a new AWS.S3 instance was throwing this:
Error: getaddrinfo ENOTFOUND
at errnoException (dns.js:37:11)
at Object.onanswer [as oncomplete] (dns.js:124:16)
It'll be interesting to find out the root cause, assuming it ever comes out. Malice or stupidity? Did someone do an oops within the Outlook team (or some other team), or are they under attack?
I've heard from people know that an AD GPO was pushed causing firewalls to refuse DNS requests, which would fit in line with what everyone was/is seeing.
Pro tip for anyone trying to check if a DNS record is working: do an NS lookup in cmd (Windows) in interactive mode. Set the server to the IP of a root DNS zone network (you can find these on Google) then enter that. Now do an nslookup for the domain you want.
Actually no. The first step would be to go directly and query the nameservers set in the whois record (not the registrars which could be wrong but the registry).
For xbox.com that is:
Name Server: NS1.MSFT.NET
Name Server: NS2.MSFT.NET
Name Server: NS3.MSFT.NET
Name Server: NS4.MSFT.NET
Name Server: NS5.MSFT.NET
While looking at this, I saw some other temporary DNS fails as well, including HN, Google News, and Twitter. But all came back quickly, except for Outlook/Microsoft domains. (I'm in Minnesota)
I have my domain at outlook.com and my MX record points to edcb3f68479b498ee412acc8524def.pamx1.hotmail.com and I am getting no return for that. There is a big outage somewhere
It's working just fine for me. I use Outlook.com mostly as one of several back-up email accounts. I tested it by sending a message to my Gmail account, and all is well.
Yeps, a lot of Microsoft services are down. I'm in europe and can't reach outlook.com, microsoft.com, windowsazure.com and probably a whole bunch of other services
I have no problem accessing Outlook.com, Office 365, Skydrive, or any other Microsoft website. The problem many be regional...or it may be with your ISP.
