Daily Archives: October 2, 2020

Microsoft Exchange Online goes down – again

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Microsoft’s Exchange Online service fell over in the early hours of this morning.The company’s status orifice initially figured that the problem mainly affected users in India as its engineers noted the wobbling at around 0700 BST. Just under an hour later Microsoft had to admit it was another global outage.It is the latest in what appears to be a battle of who can annoy their users more. Azure suffered a major outage earlier this week. Rival Apple then hit back with its own wobble before Microsoft continued the TITSUP* tit-for-tat this morning.The mystery issue afflicted apps using Exchange Online protocols, including Outlook on the desktop, mobile devices, and “those dependant on REST functionality,” Microsoft said. The company was taking a long hard look at what it might have changed in recent days that might have broken something.

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Microsoft eventually pinned the blame on a “recent configuration update”, rolled it back and, at time of writing, was “monitoring the service” for signs of life.

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Users reported problems sending and receiving mails, accessing folders and attachments, or even being able to log into their services. Some noted difficulty synchronising between Azure Active Directory and Exchange Online while there were also isolated reports of SharePoint and Teams struck by the curse of bork.

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Source: Where are we now? Microsoft 363? 362? We’ve lost count because Exchange Online isn’t playing nicely this morning • The Register

Yay cloud!

Indian Startups Explore Alliance and Alternative App Store To Fight Google’s Monopoly

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More than 150 startups and firms in India are working to form an alliance and toying with the idea of launching an app store to cut their reliance on Google, five people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The list of entrepreneurs includes high-profile names, such as Vijay Shekhar Sharma, co-founder and chief executive of Paytm (India’s most valuable startup), Deep Kalra of travel ticketing firm MakeMyTrip, and executives from PolicyBazaar, RazorPay, and Sharechat. The growing list of founders expressed deep concerns about Google’s “monopolistic” hold on India, home to one of the world’s largest startup ecosystems, and discussed what they alleged was unfair and inconsistent enforcement of Play Store’s guidelines in the country. Their effort comes days after a small group of firms including Epic Games, Spotify, Basecamp, Match Group, ProtonMail forged their own coalition to pressure Apple and Google to make changes to their marketplace rules. The conversations in India, which began in recent weeks, escalated on Tuesday after Google said that starting next year developers with an app on Google Play Store must give the company a cut of as much as 30% of several app-related payments. Dozens of executives “from nearly every top startup and firm” in India attended a call on Tuesday to discuss the way forward, some of the people said, requesting anonymity. A 30% cut to Google is simply unfeasible, people on the call unanimously agreed.

Source: Indian Startups Explore Alliance and Alternative App Store To Fight Google’s ‘Monopoly’ – Slashdot

I spoke about this in 2019 and it’s interesting to see where this is going