back to article Microsoft cloud TITSUP: Skype, Outlook, Xbox, OneDrive, Hotmail down

Microsoft cloud services have dived offline, taking down Outlook, Hotmail, OneDrive, Skype, and Xbox Live. The problems appear to have started on Tuesday morning Pacific Time, although systems could have started to wobble earlier: basically, people were and still are unable to log into their Microsoft-hosted services. Outlook …

  1. Geoffrey W

    My msn email accounts don't work on my windows machines, either in client program or web mail, but they do work in my android tablet. Go figure. If you're having email trouble and have a tablet, try that.

    1. Dan 55 Silver badge

      If you're using the official Outlook app, it uses a cloudy back end which is hooked up to the inbox in a different way to provide push. It also has your credentials stored to do this.

      1. BillG
        Go

        The company I work for has many of these services, thankfully we've had no service interruptions today.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Microsoft Host^Hed Services

      There. Fixed it for you.

  2. Chris G

    A little ray of sunshine

    I have just gotten back into my hotmail account here in Spain on my w7 laptop, the odd thing is my account was still open and functioning on my android phone, since outlook/hotmail went cloudy the service has turned to a steaming heap of dung.

    It is slow, over complicated to sign in and the UI has degraded even further, the last time being when hotmail was dumped in favour of the outlook flavour. I keep it going because it is easier than trying to migrate all of my contacts to something else, maybe I should rethink.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: A little ray of sunshine

      "went cloudy"

      What do you mean "went cloudy," Sunshine? Hotmail was a giant "cloud service" back in the 1990s, they just didn't think to call it that then. Is O365 a crappy service trying to capture what's left of the Exchange/Outlook market before they figure out that you can do email and scheduling with any app, not just "The Precious?" Of COURSE IT IS! Is Hotmail a garbage dump of an online webmail app that makes people wonder why MS is still propping it up and making it part of their Authentication services under the outlook.com property then shoehorning it into whatever runs the O365 suite? Sure, we all do! Did Hotmail have any outages BEFORE all that happened? You bet. So, what exactly is your problem again? :P

  3. Dazzz

    Welcome to the cloud...

    I wonder if they tried turning it off and on again

    1. Jon Smit

      If that fails

      Clear the cache...

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Doesn't help if you've mangled autoexec.bat on the c:\ drive.

      1. Geoffrey W

        If your autoexec.bat and config.sys files are mangled, just run MemMaker to help you straighten them out. I wouldn't be without it. You'll have loads of high and extended memory in no time. Perhaps as much as 1 MB even.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Apparently the One Drive issue is they modified the boot.ini and turned off /fastdetect. hence the time it's taking to come back online.

        2. prindlefly

          Sysedit is also your friend. Don't forget to check your system.ini and win.ini. Don't forget to defrag. Ugh, where is Norton Utilities when you need it?

          1. Alan W. Rateliff, II
            Facepalm

            You tossers have it all wrong: just delete system32. Duh!

          2. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

            Ugh, where is Norton Utilities when you need it?

            Over there, crying in the corner after being borged by Symantec..

            1. Geoffrey W

              And where's Peter Norton, the glamorous cover model of Norton Utility boxes with his shirt sleeves rolled up? Bet he isn't crying in the corner. He's in the attic counting all his Symantec money.

  4. Martin Summers Silver badge

    This has been going on a lot longer. Wobbles started happening with Office 365 Outlook around 10:30am GMT and started getting back to normal seemingly around 4pm. Seemed to affect email with attachments first and then email just stopped being delivered completely.

  5. Johnny Canuck

    My boss is down in Jamaica for 2 weeks and just phoned me because he can't get into his Microsoft email. Oddly, he's not able to connect to the hotel's wireless either.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Nah gowan! Don' even worry about it, mon! I'll be down straight away to check on dis and other tings! Tell 'em I'll be dere about 4:20 local time.

    2. Mystic Megabyte
      Joke

      @Johnny Cannuck

      Did she go of her own accord?

  6. PhilBuk
    Thumb Down

    A Bit Up and Down

    Got a quote from an insurer via the hotmail account on my phone. Went to a PC to look at it full size and Outlook 2013 prompted me to login - failed. Went to webmail tried to log in, got a page saying that the page I wa trying to view was not TLS 1.1, 1.2 or 1.3 compatible - Microsoft's own page! Went back to phone to forward email to a non hotmail address and, now, couldn't connect to hotmail.

    Long live the cloud!, and so on.

    Phil.

  7. Digitall
    Facepalm

    Steady as she goes MS

    As if we aren't having enough grief with their OS patching..

    1. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: Steady as she goes MS

      how long before the MS login for Win-10-nic stops working?

  8. IGnatius T Foobar
    FAIL

    Microsoft FAIL

    'nuff said :)

  9. Alan Sharkey

    Weird - all mine are working fine - 3 O365 accounts and one Outlook one.

    1. TheVogon

      All working for me too - and OneDrive.

  10. Terry 6 Silver badge

    Nah

    No point going all MS blaming on this one.. It's the principle of the cloudiness that's the problem. Stuff goes wrong. When it's cloudy stuff lots goes wrong.

    1. kain preacher

      Re: Nah

      But, but I thought the cloud was bullet proof. That's what Peo0ple like amazon and MS keep on telling me.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Nah

      All true, but, er, Microsoft decided to hitch its wagon to the cloud. So to speak.

      1. TRT Silver badge

        Re: Nah

        The Cloud is more bullet resilient than bullet proof. In that what would normally kill outright just leaves little holes everywhere. Mind you, if it heart bleeds, we can kill it.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    My Hotmail is a bit like the grand old duke of York. When it's up it's up and when it's down it's down.

    1. Dan 55 Silver badge

      And when it's only half way up they forgot to renew the certificates.

    2. P. Lee

      >My Hotmail is a bit like the grand old duke of York. When it's up it's up and when it's down it's down.

      and when its only halfway up?

      That's when Shroedinger is the happiest!

  12. Tom Paine

    Ouchie

    Good luck explaining that "stuff breaks. When cloudy stuff breaks, lots of stuff breaks" to angry wrathful execs if you just persuaded your org to migrate...

    1. Martin Summers Silver badge

      Re: Ouchie

      Then you'll remind them of the revenue cost after it has all died down and they'll be happy again. I for one am grateful that I don't have to mess about supporting exchange server, as I think many people are.

      1. Zippy's Sausage Factory
        Paris Hilton

        Re: Ouchie

        Then you'll remind them of the revenue cost after it has all died down and they'll be happy again. I for one am grateful that I don't have to mess about supporting exchange server, as I think many people are.

        Doesn't work when it means you've just lost a £100K (or more) deal. In that case it's usually "who suggested we start using this rubbish - I want them fired and a proper system installed to replace this malarkey, AND I WANT IT TODAY"

        (Paris Hilton because that's as good an analogy for an IT manager as I can think of...)

    2. lorisarvendu

      Re: Ouchie

      "Good luck explaining that "stuff breaks. When cloudy stuff breaks, lots of stuff breaks" to angry wrathful execs if you just persuaded your org to migrate..."

      Ah but we in IT get angry wrathful execs almost every week when something somewhere breaks. Regardless of whether we have control over it or not (or whether we caused it or not!), each time that we fix it (or it fixes itself), the execs calm down, agree with us that "stuff happens" and go away, telling us we're the best IT Department ever...until the next time. Repeat ad nauseam.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Ouchie

        "telling us we're the best IT Department ever...until the next time. Repeat ad nauseam"

        Got any jobs. A thank you once a decade would be an improvement.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Ouchie

          That only really matters if it's genuinely meant, which if the threats and shouting occur again the next time there's an outage, it's really not any better than being ignored/constantly badgered.

          Anon because, well, take a guess what my relationship with my management is like?

    3. Phil W

      Re: Ouchie

      "if you just persuaded your org to migrate"

      If you did the persuading in a company large enough to have multiple people who could be titled "exec" then you deserve to be taken outside and shot anyway. Either you're in IT and have no idea what you're talking about, or you're not in IT and shouldn't be trying to persuade the execs to make major IT changes anyway.

  13. Alister

    Sorry, my fault...

    Despite my objections, we migrated to Office365 from on-prem Exchange last week.

    It's obvious that Microsoft's infrastructure just can't cope now, we broke it...

    Sorry...

    1. Hans 1
      Coffee/keyboard

      Re: Sorry, my fault...

      Despite my objections, we migrated to Office365 from on-prem Exchange last week.

      It's obvious that Microsoft's infrastructure just can't cope now, we broke it...

      Sorry...

      You have to admit, Office 332 is cheap, really cheap ... at some point, when you wanna scale, you need enterprise OS' (so no Windows), then, you need more than under-grads with a Minesweeper MCP .... MS only have to survive until the competition is chapter 11, then they can raise prices 100 fold ... and the IDIOTS are migrating in droves, we migrated months ago ... I told them, The World Won't Listen! At least we keep on premise Exchange, you know, in case; AS THE MS SALES GUY TOLD US ... no downtime for us ... you poor sods!

      What is the bloody point of migrating to Office 332 when we have to keep Exchange in-house in case MS f*cks up ??????????

      As Mr Smith £ family would put it, The World Won't Listen!

    2. Alan W. Rateliff, II
      Happy

      Re: Sorry, my fault...

      And for all that cancer...

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WP3X0dSV9kI

  14. benderama

    There goes the migration from google I was about to explore...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Don't worry, I'm sure Google will fuck something up, issue a half arsed apology, promise to do better and then fuck something else up.

  15. ashdav

    Oops!

    To quote a phrase I read elsewhere:

    "It's not the Cloud, it's someone else's computer."

    They're not doing very well lately are they.

  16. J.Smith

    How dare they!!!!1

    Typical M$ &%$£&^$. Why do they have to ruin everything, so evil. This proves they really are the devil incarnate, as if proof were needed. I hate &&%£&*^ M$ so much.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: How dare they!!!!1

      Forgot your meds?

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Facepalm

    So what does this make it now? Office 359?

    MS Office is taking more days off than the French!

    1. Hans 1
      Happy

      Re: So what does this make it now? Office 359?

      So what does this make it now? Office 359?

      No, Office 350, and we're still in March ... February already saw a week of TITSUP ....

  18. Hans 1
    Coffee/keyboard

    Patch Tuesday

    Even MS waits for the Windows users to test patches ... then they realize the 44 reboots per server on patch Tuesdays really has consequences on availability of essentially services ...it's March, they cannot blame certificates this time ...

    Poor sods ...

    1. Anonymous IV

      Re: Patch Tuesday

      > 44 reboots per server on patch Tuesdays

      For 44 read 1.

      Unless you exist in a Trumpal environment...

      1. Hans 1

        Re: Patch Tuesday

        > 44 reboots per server on patch Tuesdays

        For 44 read 1.

        I actually meant 4, that's how many my Windows Server 2012 R2 needed last time ...

  19. MJI Silver badge

    Why does?

    Hotmail bring up that outlook turd, or some generic login nothing to do with hotmail.

    I need to migrate those last two accouts off it.

    1. Tom Paine

      Re: Why does?

      "Hotmail"? It hasn't been Hotmail for, what, a decade is it?

      1. MJI Silver badge

        Re: Why does?

        Still says hotmail in the address, so still hotmail to me.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    A familiar pattern

    Nothing new here to anyone who has observed the corporate IT scene for a few decades.

    IBM took fright at the threat from Apple (which was never any kind of threat to it) and created Microsoft, the most dangerous rival it has ever had.

    DEC, facing serious difficulties, chose to continue as a hardware company while more or less killing its software business - presumably because, as software manager David Stone told the board, software made profits and hardware made none.

    And now we see Microsoft looking around for new worlds to conquer, and choosing the cloud. "Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first send mad".

    Although right now it seems as if it's the customers who are really mad. At Microsoft.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: A familiar pattern

      And, such are the tribulations and shortcomings of conglomerates like M$ in general, and oligopolies of them in particular. That is, they have no particular allegiance to, or need to improve, any one of their varied unrelated products or services, aiming instead for the survival and profit of the overall financial operation, and when they fail as in this case, they take down multiple services, or products, at once, products and services that had no economic justification for being in the same house, or cloud, to begin with.

  21. Roger B

    At least for me it lead to a slightly more productive evening, no email, no OneDrive and no Xbox.

    Here's one for the conspiracy theorists though, my Windows 10 laptop, admittedly its ancient, but it has been on this evening and felt more sluggish than usual, I'd not bothered switching anything else on to check, but how much of Windows 10 is reliant on cloud services?

    1. P. Lee

      >how much of Windows 10 is reliant on cloud services?

      Just the telemetry uploads.

  22. InNY
    Coat

    Anyone

    got ten bob for the meter?

    Interpreter: ten bob= 50 pence (sterling) meter = electricity meter you put money in to get electricity.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Coat

      Re: Anyone

      Crap, that's where I went wrong....I tried to get gas from my leccy meter.

      Still at least I can build a brand new house on the newly charred land.

    2. Zippy's Sausage Factory

      Re: Anyone

      Although pre-decimalistion, ten bob was ten shillings (20 shillings to the £). And used to be a note, before it was a coin... (I still have a lot of ten shilling coins in my collection, but no notes, alas...)

  23. Almost Me

    Probably asking everyone for their parent's permission to log in

    All of our Skype accounts suddenly stopped working because apparently (a) we apparently were born in 2015, (some years after the accounts were created), and therefore need our parent's permission to log in, and (b) have Credit cards with US addresses even though we don't live there so we can prove our age...

    Makes me glad my company's not using Azure... and now not planning to.

  24. a_yank_lurker

    Buggy Patches?

    Slurp found out what the rest of us plebes put up with when they release a pre-alpha grade patch. </snark>.

  25. zen1

    As a firewall engineer

    I got blamed because a number of our users couldn't use outlook services. F U Microsoft!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Joke

      Re: As a firewall engineer

      To be fair, it is normally your fault....

  26. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Likely due to System Administrators mis-configuring something... This happens more often than most IT people realize...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      WTF?

      I think IT people know misconfiguring something breaks stuff.

      That's why you do boring stuff like change controls and asking people to check your config.

  27. Tim99 Silver badge
    Joke

    @Iain

    So it sounds like someone broke something within Microsoft's account authentication systems...

    How would you be able to tell?

  28. This post has been deleted by its author

  29. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Trollface

    Outlook, Skype, XBox, OneDrive, Hotmail

    Once upon a blissful time, all these were separate products, with separate authentication services etc etc. When one broke down, it didn't hinder any of the others.

    Now, tell me again why it was such a good idea to regroup all these totally different products into the same Single Point Of Failure mode ? Economies of Scale, you say ?

    Well, you're not economizing on the scale of the failures, now are you ?

    1. MJI Silver badge

      Re: Outlook, Skype, XBox, OneDrive, Hotmail

      Is that why I get strange logins for Hotmail now?

      I don't have a Skype, nor a One Drive, nor an X Box?

      What has an email account to do with online telephones, or a gaming login?

      NOTHING

      I have had 2 Hotmail accounts for YEARS. They are now approaching unusable, one is my fail over non ISP non my mail server account, and the other my risky use one.

  30. Shane McCarrick

    Skype is still out here @ 06.40 on Wednesday in Ireland.

    One Drive- can't login either.

    Not sure about the other services (I don't use them).

    It ain't fixed yet!

  31. Daniel B.
    Trollface

    Really fun

    While I did suffer from having my Hotmail account go down, it's got an upside. This is going to be perfect trolling material against Xbox fanbois. So, paying for online means this shouldn't have happened, amirite?

  32. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Happy

    On the other hand...

    I had an outage the other day. Lost email for, oh, about 2 hours. Everything else was fine.

    I sort of feel cheated now. Why can't I have proper outages like everyone else?

  33. ad47uk

    The only thing I use out of that lot is Skype and it have been ok here as far as i know, maybe it is because i do not use a MSaccount to sign into it, but I can not see how.

  34. JLV
    Trollface

    >Hotmail was a giant "cloud service" back in the 1990s

    Wasn't Hotmail originally running on BSDs, when MS bought it? And stayed that way a while, till it became embarassing for them.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Sure was.

    2. Huw D

      Does that matter?

      It was someone else's computer. Therefore "cloud".

  35. Solarflare
    Alert

    I got part of the blame for this

    ...from the missus, as she couldn't get her email on her phone. She accepted it was probably a microsoft problem when everything else worked fine and we just couldn't connect to login.live.com. You bugger about with your internal network one* time and she blames every future hiccough on you for evermore...

    *OK...perhaps it was more than one time, your honour.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I got part of the blame for this

      I don't bugger with the network at all yet, since I'm the expert, it must be my fault. Nope, it's the 16-yo. Last time was locking us adults out of the router, which lasted only as long as it took me to change the MAC address. And, no, the teen couldn't have done it. I'm the expert, he doesn't know this shit.

  36. BongoJoe

    Good News

    At least this has stopped people hacking into my Skype account and sending out Baidu links for a few hours...

    1. Mystic Megabyte
      Happy

      Re: Good News

      Just in case you have not heard this most excellent Bongo related song. SFW

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJMLJVha5sw

  37. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    Here we go.

    We're all just going to have to get used to this. I've been in IT for a while, and I've always strived to build software that works, keeps working or at the very least provides meaningful diagnostics that pass the '3am test' if things do go wrong.

    We accepted unreliability from early versions of Windows - after all it was Microsoft, the problems were local and machines could be swiftly be rebooted. Then we all got real operating systems everywhere and things really just started to work. Even Windows.

    Now in some ways we've come full circle - the unreliability is back again, but we've got out of the habit of coding around it or providing useful diagnostics. Even worse - the unreliable machines are no longer ours, and can no longer be rebooted quickly to correct problems. And even worse is that the generation of junior developers coming into the industry think that's just how things are, that you can hack anything together given 48 hours and enough Pizza.

    Experienced people are being managed out of companies to save money, and so much outsourcing has happened that no-one's truly sure or really cares who's responsible for what any more.

    We are going to see some terrible outcomes from all this and we're going to see them soon.

  38. VulcanV5

    There seems to be something wrong with your computer . . .

    Wife and I had an outlook.com email address in our names. Like gmail and ymail, it was synched to deliver to us whenever called upon by our desktop client. The way Microsoft had it working was as follows:

    Monday morning, outlook emails are delivered. Tuesday afternoon, they're not: no server connection possible. Wednesday lunch, everything OK, Wednesday night, oops, big red X plastered over the outlook account, no server connection possible. Thursday: no server connection all day. Friday: everything working all day. Saturday: working half a day. Sunday: big red X, 'please check your configuration'.

    This state of affairs occurred throughout November. December. And January. Microsoft's considered advice was that something seems to be going wrong somewhere on your computer. Told that actually, it isn't our outlook.com address configuration on this computer which changes by the hour but Microsoft's ability to actually deliver anything which changes by the hour. Why might that be, Mr Redmond? Microsoft's response: check your configuration, re-install, re-test, blah blah etc blah. If you require further help, please visit our forum.

    We no longer have an outlook.com email address, though still keep a barge-pole to ensure that any contact with any other of Microsoft's superb services is pushed resolutely aside.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: There seems to be something wrong with your computer . . .

      Could there be a reason why some people refer to it as "Outhouse"?

      I know I always have.

  39. Duffaboy
    Trollface

    Trust the Cloud ?

    With more and more companies shoving their data to the cloud remember this, all you are doing is storing it on someone else's server

  40. kmac499

    Alexa Send an email...

  41. Jim 68
    Windows

    I Just Assumed...

    The Internet being what it is these days, I assumed the periodic hiccups in MS cloud svcs were due to a DDoS attack on their authentication servers. Fortunately in my case reloading the page a few times got through and everything I did Tuesday seems to be there today.

  42. Rattus Rattus

    I noticed nothing

    Glad I never fell for that cloudy nonsense. And due to my work's confidentiality needs there's no cloudiness there either.

  43. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Pardon us while we install our NSA "patch"

    There all better now...

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