back to article Microsoft partner portal 'exposes 'every' support request filed worldwide' today

Alarmed Microsoft support partners can currently view support tickets submitted from all over the world, in what appears to be a very wide-ranging blunder by the Redmond-based biz. “At the moment in the Microsoft Partner Portal you can see every ticket title for every support request worldwide!” Stuart Crane of IT biz Everon …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    More Microsoft user based testing

    For most businesses, this would be a cause of serious reputation damage.

    But this is a Microsoft written system. They fired their testers to enable user based testing.

    And this is user based testing in action.

    So... "nothing special to see here, move along".

    It's not like it could make their reputation any worse.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: More Microsoft user based testing

      Microsoft's Satan Nadella and Bethesda's Todd Coward seem to be engaged in a spirited contest to see who can torque their "user-based testing" program the furthest into the ground.

      1. ds6 Silver badge

        Re: More Microsoft user based testing

        Fallout v0.76b

        Sign up now for the low low price of full price to get access to the private beta

        1. TheSkunkyMonk

          Re: More Microsoft user based testing

          For an hour if you stay up really late. Fallout 5 with a Coop mode was what we really wanted, even if it was just inviting them as a companion... We would of loved it.

  2. DJV Silver badge
    Facepalm

    Another day...

    ...another Microsoft cockup.

    Testing... yeah, we used to do that...

    Sigh...

  3. TRT Silver badge

    Can't have exposed THAT many tickets...

    I mean, their software is perfect, right? Mind you, I can see some meta- hilarity here... submit a ticket about being able to see other users tickets.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Can't have exposed THAT many tickets...

      "submit a ticket about being able to see other users tickets."

      After that it's tickets all the way down.

  4. Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

    Are email addresses personal data? Because that top image contains one as a request subject.

    Even if not, it would have been polite to blur it.

    1. Nick Ryan Silver badge

      Yes, they are considered Personal Data because they identify an individual. There is a bit of fuzziness around business to business communications particularly as jsmith@example.com would relate to an individual, it's the context and exposure that is important.

      ...and yes. El'reg should have done the correct thing and obscured the email address.

    2. m0rt

      I suspect this was a genuine error - see the 'tips and corrections' button at the bottom of the article?

      1. Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

        The email problem. As much as I loathe web forms, there are times when one would be useful.

    3. diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Email address

      It's blurred - we didn't clock the address in the screenshot. Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything wrong.

      C.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Such a thing doesn’t appear to have happened before

    interesting... on one hand, no data breach, on another, confidentiality (trust) breach. So... has anyone scooped those messages, are we going to get an "independent" research done and published on what is wrong with MS software? ;)

    ...

    LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY MS SOFTWARE...(!)

    1. Wellyboot Silver badge

      Re: Such a thing doesn’t appear to have happened before

      Research & Statistics would be nice. In a year or so we could then find out what the biggest user problem is that MS really doesn't care about fixing.

      1. Hans 1
        Windows

        Re: Such a thing doesn’t appear to have happened before

        I personally think the worst was the 1809, 1810, 1811, 1812, and 1901 Windows updates failing to install ... to try and hide their incompetence and confuse the feeble-minded, Microsoft stuck to keeping the 1809 name for the patches ... 4 successive patches to the patch and still fails ... I dunno ... Ubuntu, that gets nowhere as "privileged" vendor support, has not missed a single semestrial patch iteration over the course of a decade, and MS has only just started with this release cycle.

      2. Zippy´s Sausage Factory

        Re: Such a thing doesn’t appear to have happened before

        Well there's a bug in page numbering that appeared in Word 6 they still haven't fixed in Office 2016, but I suspect that's "longest running" rather than "biggest"...

        1. FlamingDeath Silver badge
          Mushroom

          Re: Such a thing doesn’t appear to have happened before

          There is a bug in Microsoft Outlook that's over 10 years old, where the Drafts folder will just disappear, googling the symptoms clearly shows people asking the same question about why their Drafts folder disappeared from Outlook 2003 all the way upto TheCloud™ ©365

          Outlook, the gift that just keeps on giving and is relentless enough to make someone lose their mind and throw their junk windows pc out of the window

  6. adnim
    Joke

    ...every ticket title for every support request worldwide!

    I didn't realise there were enough bits in the Universe.

    Algorithmic compression to the rescue?

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: ...every ticket title for every support request worldwide!

      Maybe the Ticket Management systems runs on a Quantum Computer?

  7. OrneryRedGuy

    File a support request?

    Has anybody filed a support request to address this? Should be easy enough to check...

    1. dom_f

      Re: File a support request?

      At the moment you get " We are experiencing a problem with our support system. Some features are currently unavailable at this time. An azure support agent will reach out to you." and a support ticket reference beginning "TMP-".......

      1. Nolveys
        Meh

        Re: File a support request?

        An azure support agent will reach out to you.

        I don't think that groping will help this situation.

  8. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    FAIL

    Microsfot

    The gift that keeps on giving.

    The title was a typo, but it's sort-of appropriate so I think I 'll leave it.

    1. A.P. Veening Silver badge

      Re: Microsfot

      I'll correct it for you:

      Macrosof

      Macro - Pretty self explaining

      sof - slang for embarrasing failure

    2. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Meh

      Re: Microsfot

      Win-10-nic has that "cloudy" Microsoft Logon (a descendent of the old 'Passport' idea from the early noughties when they STARTED that ".Not" nonsense). The idea was "one logon to rule them all" etc. everywhere you go. It's probably tied to support requests, somehow....

      Right now it's support tickets (allegedly with no identifying info) where "things" are leaking out. What's next? If everyone using a 'Microsfot' computer is being TRACKED via the "cloudy" login, are "partners" able to view that info in real time? Is that data going to be 'exposed' too? Today, support tickets. Tomorrow, ???

      1. stiine Silver badge

        Re: Microsfot

        That would be fucking hilarious.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Good stuff

    This might be the most useful information on Microsoft site. Usually I have to Google it to see if others are having the same issues...

    1. Adrian 4

      Re: Good stuff

      They aren't.

      Issues are only ever experienced by 'a small number of users'.

      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

        Re: Good stuff

        Not this time. MS carefully avoided mentioning "a small number of users" and instead said "a small subset of functions". So that's all right. Only a few things were broken, but everyone was affected.

      2. herman

        Re: Good stuff

        A million here, a million there, pretty soon, you have a small number of users.

  10. Blockchain commentard
    Facepalm

    TITSUP = Total IT Support (for) Users Publicised ?

    1. Sanctimonious Prick

      Total Inability To Support Usual Performance

      :)

  11. Tom 7

    I grabbed a copy and did some analysis.

    95% seem to be the three words 'kill me now'.

  12. This post has been deleted by its author

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Nothing to see here, move along

    This particular portal, and the associated licensing program has weekly if not daily issues that cause far more pain than this one. And maybe one or two previous issues that have been far more serious than this little foobar... But you won't hear much about it due to a little thing called an NDA.

    @Reg you might also want to blur this partners name from the photo, i'm pretty sure they are in breach of their Microsoft Cloud Reseller Agreement.

  14. Milton

    Before anyone asks—

    Before anyone asks—

    —the 2.7818x10⁶ submission titles including the terms "f***ed", "again", "Dynamics 365", "dreadful", "inconsistent" and "b****y hopeless" do in fact belong to me.

    Plus, if any of the actual tickets' content becomes exposed, I accept responsibility for several thousand which include phrases along the lines of "What were you THINKING?", "Incredible design stupidity", and one particularly anguished cri de coeur alleging "Coding outsourced to Crotobaltislavonian retards with chronic bilateral frostbite"

    The few remaining complaints about shoddy code and avoidable screwups obviously belong to other happy Microsoft victi customers.

    ⁢⁡

    ⁢⁢ A paltry ~4x10⁷⁰

  15. Dwarf

    Security, yep, we’ve heard of that.

    Good job nobody relies on them for the security and privacy of their data.

    Are we still expected to trust them on the separation between customers in their cloudy thing when they can’t even secure their internal systems ?

    I wonder how many other systems are poorly configured and yet to be discovered.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Looks like there is some sort of bug affecting the date formatting too

    Looks like there is some sort of bug affecting the date formatting in the support tracking system too...

    "M/D/YY", that looks pretty seriously messed up, I hope they can fix it back to "DD/MM/YYYY" or "YYYY-MM-DD" soon...

    (I will be very interested to see the proportion of down- and up-votes for this...)

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