So glad I have a job that primarily consists of just driving around and looking out the window, lol. I get very few email, and most of those are just a waste of time anyway so I didn't even notice until my boss told me it was down. It can stay down all week for all I care. Even back in the days when I worked IT at a desk, email was just a way for other people to interrupt me while I was trying to get actual work done.

Back To The Fax Machine: Microsoft's Meltdown Exposes The Agentic Economy's Weakest Link

Traders reached for fax machines, Japan's finance ministry pinned paper notices to the wall, and the AI assistants meant to automate the office went dark right along with the inbox.

For more than 18 hours, the AI agents Silicon Valley says will soon do your job couldn't read your email, because nobody could. A Microsoft 365 failure that began Thursday knocked out Outlook for businesses and governments in more than 70 countries and took Microsoft's own Copilot down with it, along with the Microsoft connectors that Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's ChatGPT use to reach users' mail and calendars.

Every one of those failures has one thing in common: Exchange Online, Microsoft's cloud email and calendar backend. In its status notice Friday morning, Microsoft said features across its 365 services "that interact with Exchange Online and email services are impacted," while "elements of those services that do not depend on interaction with Exchange Online remain functional." Teams calls and group chats mostly kept working. Anything that had to touch a mailbox did not.

https://www.zerohedge.com/tech...conomys-weakest-link

Why didn’t AI fix this? After all isn’t that why they got rid of humans in the loop.

If this was AI’s chance to shine, it failed miserably.

quote:

We will continue to treat this with urgency until full mitigation, and we will share a full Post-Incident Report with root cause and defense-in-depth actions after mitigation is complete.

That was written either by AI or by Peggy.

I am amused at all of this.

Probably, I shouldn't be, but I am.

This just proves my point that we need analog for at least backup systems, and people need to be retrained to use analog.

Today has really highlighted the flaw with 2FA. 3 sites today have not allowed me to choose whether to do 2FA with e-mail or text, and the 2FA e-mail hasn't appeared after 3 hours.

I think its a good thing that these systems crash from time to time. It awakens us to the vulnerability we have put ourselves into from total reliance on them.
If there was ever a full scale War our electronics would be the first target, the populace could be without any electronic aids for years.
We should always have a backdoor through analog and manual systems Like we did in WW2.because that would be about where we would be.

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Originally posted by r0gue:

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Originally posted by Larry_K:
Being in IT, I picked a really good time to have taken a few days off I'll be back to work on Monday and I'm sure I'll get to hear the horror stories from the other guys.

Well, to be honest, it's not so bad to be on right now. The email firehose has stopped, and Teams meeting are pretty light right now!

The problem yesterday for the guys working was dealing with all the ticked off users that thought we could somehow get MS to speed up on fixing the outage. We have about 2100 users between quite a few businesses and many don't grasp that we don't have a direct line to someone at Microsoft to fix this.

Unfortunately Teams stayed up for my office, so our phones were ringing of the hook all day. But, I enjoyed watching reruns on Netflix in my pajamas.