Category Archives: Cloud

cloud computing and why it’s a good or bad idea

Outlook out in North America, Microsoft scrambles for a fix

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Microsoft confirmed a major email service outage across North America that is stopping inboxes from filling up and may be hitting other apps when logging in.

“We’re investigating an issue affecting a portion of infrastructure in North America, where users may be unable to access their mailbox via any Exchange Online connection method,” it stated in a notice at 0936 in its home time zone (1636 UTC for the rest of customers.)

Outlook outage on the map

The usual suspects are out, but no word on a fix yet – Click to enlarge

The problem is more than just the standard stutter – two hours later, Microsoft was still baffled. Microsoft has been digging through its data banks without success and blocked inboxes and unstable traffic persist. There have been unconfirmed reports of OneDrive being affected too.

“We’re continuing to evaluate service telemetry for potential system irregularities contributing to impact, and in parallel we’re applying some changes to optimize affected mailbox infrastructure,” it added two hours later.

Redmond has said it’ll update us as new information comes in, but Downdetector reports a big surge of problems for Outlook online and Microsoft 365 users starting around four hours after Microsoft said there are issues with its code. On its public support page, it was reporting “Service degradation on Microsoft consumer products.”

Things have been a bit rocky for Microsoft of late, and Outlook in particular. In July, users of the service got an 11-hour break from email when the app wasn’t “performing as efficiently as expected.” That was a software fix that went wrong, which looks very likely in this case too.

It’s in the clear on Azure problems in the Middle East; however, that’s looking like a cable break on land or sea.

[…]

Source: Outlook out in North America, Microsoft scrambles for a fix • The Register

Yes, Google Meet Is Down

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If you’re trying to use Google Meet and failing, it’s not your fault. Google is reportedly investigating the outage, and DownDetector has seen tens of thousands or reports about Google Meet not working properly since around 1:25 p.m. ET.

“We are experiencing an issue with Google Meet beginning at Monday, 2025-09-08 10:25 PDT,” Google reported on its Workspace updates page.

“Our engineering team continues to investigate the issue. We will provide an update by Monday, 2025-09-08 11:30 PDT with current details,” the tech giant explained.

There is no reportedly workaround, at least according to the company.

[…]

Source: Yes, Google Meet Is Down

MS Azure mistake erroneously hikes costs 3x during internal migration, then tries to delete evidence from customer support portal

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An alarmed Register reader got in touch after receiving warnings from Azure’s automated systems that they had significantly exceeded their budgets, and a glance at Microsoft’s support forums indicates their issue was not isolated.

The problem was that costs had suddenly ramped up. One user, with a budget threshold of £63 ($85), received an automated alert indicating that their spend was forecast to reach £758.71 ($1,027). Another said: “We’re actively seeing the same issue, costs have blown up by a crazy amount. No official notice or announcement from Microsoft either, it’s appalling.”

Suggestions from Microsoft that users should contact the support team did little to assuage concerns. A user (their caps) said: “AND I CANNOT CONTACT THE SUPPORT ANYHOW… Just automated ‘do this, do that’.”

According to messages seen by The Register, troubles appear to have stemmed from accounts being migrated from the Microsoft Online Subscription Program (MOSP) to the Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA). The transition triggered incorrect cost calculations and, in some cases, resulted in retroactive charges affecting multiple customers.

Microsoft’s engineering team swung into action amid the cries of alarm, and a spokesperson told us: “We have addressed the underlying issue and impacted customers should now see the correct values in their portal.”

The Register understands that invoices and billing shouldn’t have been affected. However, that is likely of little comfort to administrators sent into a panic by an official alert from Microsoft warning that cloud forecasts were much higher than usual. We’d recommend keeping an eye on the portal and submitting a support request if the figures have gone awry.

One user reported that their comments in the support forum were being deleted. While Microsoft has a lengthy Code of Conduct, it wasn’t clear precisely what was causing comments to vanish. The user suggested that perhaps it was related to the words “customer” and “care.”

Source: Microsoft cloud customers hit by messed-up migration • The Register

Futurehome Breaks IoT Devices Unless A New Subscription Is Paid For

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[…]It’s bad enough when a company goes fully kablooey, has to shut down all their backend servers and gear, and renders their products useless. That sucks, there are ways around it, and it shouldn’t be allowed, but it’s quite different than perfectly healthy companies selling a product that has features and capabilities out of the box, only to claw back those capabilities and either shut them down or stick them behind some subscription paywall.

And that latter of those examples is what is happening again, this time from Futurehome, which makes a series of smarthome IoT products.

Launched in 2016, Futurehome’s Smarthub is marketed as a central hub for controlling Internet-connected devices in smart homes. For years, the Norwegian company sold its products, which also include smart thermostats, smart lighting, and smart fire and carbon monoxide alarms, for a one-time fee that included access to its companion app and cloud platform for control and automation. As of June 26, though, those core features require a 1,188 NOK (about $116.56) annual subscription fee, turning the smart home devices into dumb ones if users don’t pay up.

“You lose access to controlling devices, configuring; automations, modes, shortcuts, and energy services,” a company FAQ page says.

You also can’t get support from Futurehome without a subscription. “Most” paid features are inaccessible without a subscription, too, the FAQ from Futurehome, which claims to be in 38,000 households, says.

That would be potentially nearly a decade of a bought product working one way, only to have its core functionality tucked behind a subscription paywall on the whim of the company. This is one of those situations that, and I don’t care what country you live in, should elicit the common sense reaction of: this shouldn’t be fucking legal. But, due to the apathy of government and the steady erosion of anything remotely representing true consumer protection, this sort of thing is happening more and more frequently.

And it’s not as though all of this functionality requires support from backend company assets, either. Some do, sure, but some of the features that suddenly don’t work appear to have nothing to do with centralized corporate servers or services.

[…]

As you’d expect, some people are attempting to figure out how to make Futurehome products work without the subscription. Perhaps as a result of that, Futurehome shut down its own user forum in June. In addition, the CEO is complaining about how the company now has to invest time and resources to fight its own customers’ attempts to make the products they bought work like they did at the time of purchase.

Futurehome has fought efforts to crack its firmware, with CEO Øyvind Fries telling Norwegian consumer tech website Tek.no, per a Google translation, “It is regrettable that we now have to spend time and resources strengthening the security of a popular service rather than further developing functionality for the benefit of our customers.”

But is it as regrettable as your own customers suddenly finding out the thing they bought won’t work anymore because your company didn’t business well enough?

Source: Smart Home Device Maker Renders Devices Dumb Unless A New Subscription Is Paid For | Techdirt

Starlink down LIVE: Elon Musk red-faced amid satellite internet’s global blackout

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Elon Musk’s satellite internet Starlink was last night hit with a global outage preventing tens of thousands of users from accessing the web.

According to DownDetector, reports of issues began to surge around 8pm GMT, with tens of thousands of worldwide users reporting issues at the peak of the outage. The difficulties persisted for several hours – and affected people in countries across the globe – until the service was finally restored this morning.

Mr Musk eventually spoke out about the chaos, apologising to Starlink’s users. He said: “Service will be restored shortly. Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

Source: Starlink down LIVE: Elon Musk red-faced amid satellite internet’s global blackout – World News – Mirror Online

US clouds crush EU clouds in the EU and that won’t change soon

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European cloud infrastructure companies make up just 15 percent of their own market, and the huge investment the US giants can wield makes their dominance “an impossible hill to climb” for any would-be challengers.

Details shared by Synergy Research on regional markets show that Euro cloud operators continue to grow, but none comes remotely close to competing with the big American rivals for leadership of European markets.

According to Synergy, local companies accounted for nearly a third (29 percent) of cloud infrastructure revenues in 2017, but by 2022 their share had dropped to just 15 percent and has held fairly steady ever since.

European cloud market share

European operators more than tripled their revenues between 2017 and 2024, yet the regional market as a whole has grown by a factor of six to reach €61 billion ($70 billion) in value, meaning the local players were simply outgrown by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

Those three global providers now account for 70 percent of the European market between them, while the largest regional firms such as SAP and Deutsche Telekom account for just a 2 percent share each.

This represents a sobering reality check amid calls for Europe to reduce its reliance on American-owned technology infrastructure, a call that gained momentum following the inauguration of President Trump and his administration’s confrontational stance toward others, particularly the EU.

As The Register reported earlier this year, data privacy worries have taken on new urgency following moves by Washington such as removing members of the US Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board that safeguards data under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, plus alleged flouting of federal data rules to advance policy goals.

And it can’t have helped that a Microsoft executive recently conceded during a French Senate inquiry that Microsoft “cannot guarantee” customer data sovereignty if the US government demands access, despite its many assurances to the contrary.

A group of nearly 100 technology companies and other organizations lobbied the European Commission in March for the creation of a sovereign infrastructure fund to invest in key technology so as to lessen dependence on US corporations.

French cloud biz OVHcloud also claimed – briefly – that it was working with the Commission to investigate shifting workloads to its platform from Microsoft’s Azure.

However analysts and other experts told us in May that decoupling from the big US cloud players would be difficult and is largely an unrealistic ambition.

“In theory, there’s nothing stopping European companies from repatriating their data and applications to European clouds, or even bringing everything back on-premise,” said Steve Brazier, former CEO at Canalys and now a Fellow at Informa.

“But in practice, it’s close to impossible. The barriers are significant, and they stack up quickly,” he added.

Synergy Research Chief Analyst John Dinsdale echoed this sentiment, noting that the sheer scale of the American operators and their financial clout has made it difficult for others to compete against them.

“As US cloud providers continue to invest some €10 billion ($11.7 billion) every quarter in European capex programs, that presents an impossible hill to climb for any companies who wish to seriously challenge their market leadership,” Dinsdale said.

“The cloud market is a game of scale where aspiring leaders have to place huge financial bets, must have a long-term view of investments and profitability, must maintain a focused determination to succeed, and must consistently achieve operational excellence.

“No European companies have come close to that set of criteria and the result is a market where the five leaders are all US companies,” he added.

European cloud providers have mostly settled into positions of serving local groups of customers that have specific local requirements, sometimes working as partners to the big US cloud providers, according to Dinsdale.

“While many European cloud providers will continue to grow, they are unlikely to move the needle much in terms of overall European market share,” he predicts.

European cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS, and hosted private cloud services) were estimated by Synergy to be €36 billion ($42 billion) in the first half of 2025, with revenues for the full year expected to be up by 24 percent year-on-year.

The largest cloud markets in Europe are the UK and Germany, but the highest growth rates are currently seen in Ireland, Spain, and Italy.

Public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) account for the bulk of the European market and continue to grow more rapidly than hosted private cloud services, Synergy says.

However, AI is increasingly driving the market, with growth of 140-160 percent seen in GenAI-specific services such as GPUaaS and GenAI PaaS, the analyst claimed. ®

Source: US clouds crush European competition on their home turf • The Register

Google Assistant Is Basically on Life Support and Things Just Got Worse

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[…]

Google Home is at the center of what I would describe as a reputation shitstorm. According to way too many people on Reddit, Google Home is so broken that some people are actually unable to even turn their smart lights on and off properly. And it’s not just lights; if Reddit complaints are anything to go off of, it looks like all kinds of smart devices are affected by problems with Google Home, including other speakers and even (disconcertingly) cameras and smart doorbells.

While Google has apparently promised to fix the issues, it looks like, for lots of people, they’ve persisted. A quick scan of the Google Home subreddit reveals that connectivity issues and general issues are still pouring in, with no official announcement from Google.

[…]

Source: Google Assistant Is Basically on Life Support and Things Just Got Worse

And that is what you get with cloud dependent crap that update themselves without any control by the user.

Cloudflare: Config change borked net access for all

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There was a disturbance in the force on July 14 after Cloudflare borked a configuration change that resulted in an outage, impacting internet services across the planet.

In a blog post, the content delivery network services biz detailed the unfortunate series of events that led to Monday’s disruption.

On the day itself, “Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 Resolver service became unavailable to the internet starting at 21:52 UTC and ending at 22:54 UTC. The majority of 1.1.1.1 users globally were affected. For many users, not being able to resolve names using the 1.1.1.1 Resolver meant that basically all Internet services were unavailable,” Cloudflare said.

But the problem originated much earlier.

The outage was caused by a “misconfiguration of legacy systems” which are used to uphold the infrastructure advertising Cloudflare’s IP addresses to the internet.

“The root cause was an internal configuration error and not the result of an attack or a BGP hijack,” the corp said.

Back on June 6 this year, as Cloudflare was preparing a service topology for a future Data Localization Suite (DLS) service, it introduced the config gremlin – prefixes connected to the 1.1.1.1 public DNS Resolver were “inadvertently included alongside the prefixes that were intended for the new DLS service.”

“This configuration error sat dormant in the production network as the new DLS service was not yet in use,  but it set the stage for the outage on July 14. Since there was no immediate change to the production network there was no end-user impact, and because there was no impact, no alerts were fired.”

On July 14, a second tweak to the service was made: Cloudflare added an offline datacenter location to the service topology for the pre-production DNS service in order “to allow for some internal testing.” But the change triggered a refresh of the global configuration of the associated routes, “and it was at this point that the impact from the earlier configuration error was felt.”

Things went awry at 2148 UTC.

“Due to the earlier configuration error linking the 1.1.1.1 Resolver’s IP addresses to our non-production service, those 1.1.1.1 IPs were inadvertently included when we changed how the non-production service was set up… The 1.1.1.1 Resolver prefixes started to be withdrawn from production Cloudflare datacenters globally.”

Traffic began to drop four minutes later and internal health alerts started to emerged. An “incident” was declared at 2201 UTC and a fix dispatched at 2220 to restore the previous configuration.

“To accelerate full restoration of service, a manually triggered action is validated in testing locations before being executed,” Cloudflare said in its explanation of the outage. Revolver alerts were cleared by 2254 UTC and DNS traffic on Resolver prefixes went back to typical levels, it added.

Data on DNSPerf shared with us by a reader indicates a length of the disruption of around three hours, far longer than Cloudflare’s summary suggests.

As a Reg reader pointed out: “Remember this is a DNS service. Every person using the service would have had no ability to use the internet. Every business using Cloudflare had no internet for the length of the outage. NO DNS = NO INTERNET.” ®

Source: Cloudflare: Config change borked net access for all • The Register

Spotify was down for a while. Yay clouds.

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April 16

The music-streaming app Spotify was down for a good chunk of time this morning, leaving millions of music fans in the lurch. Both the app and web client weren’t working, but service seem to be broadly returned to normal at this point, though lingering bugs may remain.

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At about 10:40AM ET, Spotify updated its X account saying it was working on the issue and also said that “the reports of this being a security hack are false.” We haven’t seen any such reports yet, but we’ll keep an eye on things to see if they offer any more details on this front. Finally, at 12:08PM ET, the company said things were back to normal. All told, it seems like things were down for nearly four hours, a pretty long outage.

Update, April 16, 2025, 11:04AM ET: Added details about Spotify claiming this downtime was not due to a security hack.

Update, April 16 2025, 12:18PM ET: This story and its headline have been updated to note that Spotify is now back online after its outage.

Source: Spotify was down for a while this morning, but it’s back now

This is one reason why I like my mp3s.

Windows 11 is closing a loophole that let you skip making a Microsoft account

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Microsoft is no longer playing around when it comes to requiring every Windows 11 device be set up with an internet-connected account. In its latest Windows 11 Insider Preview, the company says it will take out a well-known bypass script that let end users skip the requirement of connecting to the internet and logging in with a Microsoft account to get through the initialization process of a new PC.

As reported by Windows Central, Microsoft already requires users to connect to the internet, but there’s a way to bypass it: the bypassnro command. For those setting up computers for businesses or secondary users, or simply, on principle refuse to link their computer to a Microsoft account, the command is super simple to activate during the Windows setup process.

Microsoft cites security as one reason it’s making this change:

We’re removing the bypassnro.cmd script from the build to enhance security and user experience of Windows 11. This change ensures that all users exit setup with internet connectivity and a Microsoft Account.

Since the bypassnro command is disabled in the latest beta build, it will likely be pushed to production versions within weeks. All hope is not yet lost, as of right now the script can be reactivated with a registry edit by opening a command prompt during the initial setup (Press Shift + F10) and running the command:

reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OOBE /v BypassNRO /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f shutdown /r /t 0”

However, there’s no guarantee Microsoft will allow this additional workaround for long. There are other workarounds as well, such as using the unattended.xml automation that lets you skip the initial setup “out-of-box experience.” It’s not straightforward, though, but it makes more sense for IT departments setting up multiple computers.

As of late, Microsoft has been making it harder for people to upgrade to Windows 11 while also nudging them to move on from Windows 10, which will lose support in October. The company is cracking down on the ability to install Windows 11 on older PCs that don’t support TPM 2.0, and hounding you with full-screen ads to buy a new PC. Microsoft even removed the ability to install Windows 11 with old product keys.

Source: Windows 11 is closing a loophole that let you skip making a Microsoft account | The Verge

I don’t want a cloud based user account to run an OS on my own PC.

I won’t connect my dishwasher to your stupid cloud – why not just use buttons? Also planned obsolesence is a bitch

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I bought a Bosch 500 series because that’s what Consumer Reports recommended, and more importantly, I could find one in stock.

Bosch dishwasher open control panel

After my dad and I got it installed, I went to run a rinse cycle, only to find that that, along with features like delayed start and eco mode, require an app.

Bosch dishwasher Home Connect logo

Not only that, to use the app, you have to connect your dishwasher to WiFi, set up a cloud account in something called Home Connect, and then, and only then, can you start using all the features on the dishwasher.

Video

This blog post is a lightly-edited transcript of my latest YouTube video on Level 2 Jeff:

GE Dishwasher – Planned Obsolescence

So getting back first to that old GE dishwasher, it was, I don’t know, I think that planned obsolescence is something that applies to many consumer products today.

Companies know if they design something to last only 5 or 10 years, that means in 5 or 10 years someone’s going to have to buy a whole new one.

And on my GE Amana dishwasher, it started having weird power issues, like the controls would just not light up unless I reset the circuit breaker for a few minutes. That started happening more often, and this past Saturday it just wouldn’t come on no matter what, even after I tested and re-wired it all the way from the panel up to the dishwasher’s internal power connector.

So it was dead.

Next up, I looked at what it took to get a control board. Well… $299 for a control board that was ‘special order’ and might not even fix the problem? That’s a non-starter for my $600, 8-year-old dishwasher.

Even if I got it fixed, the front panel was starting to rust out at the hinge points (leaving some metal jaggies that my soon-to-be-crawling 6 month old could slice his fingers on), and other parts of the machine were showing signs of rust/potential future leaks…

[…]

The touch sensor, you kind of touch it and the firmware—like this new dishwasher actually takes time to boot up! I had to reset it like three times and my wife meanwhile was like laughing at me like look at this guy who does tech stuff and he can’t even figure out how to change the cycle on it.

That took about five minutes, sadly.

But eventually I pulled out the manual book because I was like… “this is actually confusing.”

It should be like: I touch the button and it changes to that mode! But that was not how it was working.

I wanted to run just a rinse cycle to make sure the water would go in, the water would pump out through the sump, and everything worked post-install.

But I couldn’t find a way to do a rinse cycle on the control panel.

So I looked in the manual and found this note:

Bosch dishwasher manual mention of Home Connect

It says options with an asterisk—including Rinse, Machine Care (self-cleaning), HalfLoad, Eco, and Delay start, are “available through Home Connect app only and depending on your model.”

The 500 series model I bought isn’t premium enough to feature a 7-segment display like the $400-more-expensive 800 series, so these fancy modes are hidden behind an app and cloud service.

I was like, “Okay, I’ll look up this app and see if I can use it over Bluetooth or locally or whatever.”

Nope! To use the app, you have to connect your dishwasher to your Wi-Fi, which lets the dishwasher reach out on the internet to this Home Connect service.

You have to set up an account on Home Connect, set up the Home Connect app on your phone, and then you can control your dishwasher through the Internet to run a rinse cycle.

That doesn’t make any sense to me.

[…]

What should be done?

When I posted on social media about this, a lot of people told me to return it.

But I spent four hours installing this thing built into my kitchen.

I hooked it up to the water, it’s running through cycles… it is working. I’ll give them that. It does the normal stuff, but you know, there are some features that don’t work without the app.

At a minimum, I think what Bosch should do is make it so that the dishwasher can be accessed locally with no requirement for a cloud account. (Really, it’d be even better to have all the functions accessible on the control panel!)

Anyone building an IoT device, here is my consumer-first, e-waste-reduction maxim:

First local, then cloud.

Cloud should be an add-on.

It should be a convenience for people who don’t know how to do things like connect to their dishwasher with an app locally.

And it’s not that hard.

A little ESP32, a little $1 chip that you can put in there could do all this stuff locally with no cloud requirement at all.

I think that there might be some quants or people who want to make a lot of money building all these cloud services.

[…]

Source: I won’t connect my dishwasher to your stupid cloud | Jeff Geerling

what the actual fuck. I don’t want to connect my dishwasher, fridge, washing machine, dryer, whatever to the cloud either.

Microsoft blames Outlook outage on another dodgy code change

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Users of Microsoft’s email service might be feeling a distinct sense of déjà vu after the web version of Outlook last night blocked access to Exchange Online mailboxes.

According to Microsoft, the problem was due to “a recent change made to a portion of Outlook on the web infrastructure, that may have resulted in impact.”

Reverting the change did the trick, and service was restored, but the question must be asked – does Microsoft test its changes before deploying to production?

The problems, according to DownDetector, began around 1730 UTC on March 19 and appeared to be worldwide. The company admitted to them via social media shortly after, saying: “We’re investigating reports of an issue affecting users’ ability to access Outlook on the web.”

Half an hour later, the company admitted it made a change that might be responsible. That change was reverted, and services started returning to normal.

This sort of incident is becoming depressingly commonplace. A lengthy outage occurred at the beginning of March which Microsoft also blamed on some dodgy code.

[…]

Source: Microsoft blames Outlook outage on another dodgy code change • The Register

‘Technical issue’ at Google deletes some customer maps timeline data

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The data was stored in Google Maps’ Timeline feature, which – for those of you who let Google track you around the world – preserves a record of locations you visit. That sounds creepy and perhaps creepier still once you realize Google makes it possible for photos to appear on the Timeline too, so that users can have a visual record of their travels.

Over the weekend, users noticed their Timelines went missing.

Google seems to have noticed, too, as The Register has seen multiple social media posts in which Timelines users share an email from the search and ads giant in which it admits “We briefly experienced a technical issue that caused the deletion of Timeline data for some people.”

The email goes on to explain that most users that availed themselves of a feature that enables encrypted backups will be able to restore their Maps Timelines data.

Users who did not make those backups can’t restore their data. Those who did make backups need to manually restore their info using a procedure Google included in its email.

[…]

This isn’t the first time Google has messed up users’ historical data: In 2023 the company shortened its default data retention time for location info from 18 to three months, but some users missed the announcement and then complained as their data was purged.

[…]

Source: ‘Technical issue’ at Google deletes some customer data • The Register

Apple Music Is Down, you can’t listen to your music because cloud

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If you wanted to play some tunes on your iPhone this afternoon, but found nothing would play, it’s not just you: As of Tuesday afternoon ET, Apple Music is down.

Apple’s System Status website currently confirms Apple Music’s downtime. As of this piece, the site shows the following status for Apple Music:

Apple Music – Outage

Today, 2:26 PM – ongoing

Some users are affected

Users may be experiencing intermittent issues with this service.

All other Apple services, including the App Store, FaceTime, iMessage, and all iCloud services, are currently online.

Source: It’s Not Just You, Apple Music Is Down | Lifehacker

Still can’t access your Outlook mailbox? You aren’t alone

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Problems with Outlook.com are continuing, with users reporting being unable to access their emails or authenticate themselves.

Part of the issue appears to be related to the initial wobble over the weekend. Some of the users affected by that outage were locked out of their accounts after repeated login failures, and Microsoft’s status center for Microsoft 365 continues to report that users might be unable to access their email using the native mail app on iOS devices.

As of today, issues persist, and Microsoft has promised another update by 2300 UTC. On the plus side, the current status has changed from “We’re analyzing available data and attempting to determine the underlying source for users’ problems” to “Our analysis of available data is ongoing as we attempt to determine the underlying source of users’ problems.”

[…]

Source: Still can’t access your Outlook mailbox? You aren’t alone • The Register

Microsoft Exchange Admin Center goes down for EU users

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Microsoft’s Exchange Administration Center (EAC) has fallen over and appears to be struggling to get up.

The issue affects users trying to access EAC to administer Exchange Online for their users. Users began expressing frustration about the service being down just before lunchtime in the UK. The issue appears widespread in Europe, with users from countries such as Germany, Poland, and Belgium reporting problems.

Canada and the US appear fine, hinting that the issue might be location-based. The Register asked Microsoft for more details, but the company has not responded.

The EAC manages mailboxes, administers groups, and migrates data, among other functions. A lot of its functionality is also accessible via PowerShell, which currently seems to be working fine. However, the company has not commented on the issue or when it will be resolved.

Microsoft is very keen for customers to migrate from on-premises versions of Exchange to the company’s cloud, although one observer on social media remarked: “The amount of downtime they are facing is getting to a point where you can’t even argue ‘Cloud has better availability.'”

Quite. The long-held assertion that the cloud is a cheaper, more reliable option than an on-premises rack of servers has been ringing increasingly hollow in recent times. Microsoft suffered an Outlook outage over the weekend, and some Microsoft 365 users experienced downtime on Monday.

[…]

Source: Microsoft Exchange Admin Center takes siesta for EU users • The Register

Payday from hell as several Brit banks report major outages

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The UK is full of unhappy workers that are unable to manage their payday cash amid online service outages at a host of major banks.

Downdetector indicates trouble at Lloyds Bank, Halifax, TSB, Nationwide, First Direct, Bank of Scotland, and Barclays, although the latter’s woes appear to have been resolved since the surge of complaints earlier today.

The same can’t be said for the others, however, which all continue to report glitches via their service status pages.

Across the board, the outages seem to be related to web and mobile banking, with the root cause unclear.

[…]

Unlike the other banks whose customers can’t access their online banking platforms, those who use Nationwide can still access their accounts and move money around seamlessly, provided the money is going into other Nationwide accounts under their control.

All affected customers are still able to use their debit and credit cards at ATMs and in shops.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the UK’s finance regulator, published a post-CrowdStrike report in October, saying it noticed an upward trend of third-party related outages hitting UK banks since the beginning of 2023.

[…]

Today’s outage comes weeks after Barclays suffered a weekend-long service wobble, that reportedly left at least one customer homeless as a result.

Source: Payday from hell as several Brit banks report major outages • The Register

After Snowden and now Trump, Europe  Finally begins to worry about US-controlled clouds

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In a recent blog post titled “It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds,” Bert Hubert, an entrepreneur, software developer, and part-time technical advisor to the Dutch Electoral Council, articulated such concerns.

“We now have the bizarre situation that anyone with any sense can see that America is no longer a reliable partner, and that the entire large-scale US business world bows to Trump’s dictatorial will, but we STILL are doing everything we can to transfer entire governments and most of our own businesses to their clouds,” wrote Hubert.

Hubert didn’t offer data to support that statement, but European Commission stats shows that close to half of European enterprises rely on cloud services, a market led by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Salesforce, and IBM – all US-based companies.

While concern about cloud data sovereignty became fashionable back in 2013 when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden disclosed secrets revealing the scope of US signals intelligence gathering and fled to Russia, data privacy worries have taken on new urgency in light of the Trump administration’s sudden policy shifts.

In the tech sphere those moves include removing members of the US Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board that safeguards data under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, alleged flouting of federal data rules to advance policy goals. Europeans therefore have good reason to wonder how much they can trust data privacy assurances from US cloud providers amid their shows of obsequious deference to the new regime.

And there’s also a practical impetus for the unrest: organizations that use Microsoft Office 2016 and 2019 have to decide whether they want to move to Microsoft’s cloud come October 14, 2025, when support officially ends. Microsoft is encouraging customers to move to Microsoft 365 which is tied to the cloud. But that looks riskier now than it did under less contentious transatlantic relations.

The Register spoke with Hubert about his concerns and the situation in which Europe now finds itself.

[…]

Source: Europe begins to worry about US-controlled clouds • The Register

It was truly unbelievable that EU was using US cloud in the first place for many reasons ranging from technical to cost to privacy but they just keep blundering on.

Microsoft said it lost weeks of security logs for its customers’ cloud products

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Microsoft has notified customers that it’s missing more than two weeks of security logs for some of its cloud products, leaving network defenders without critical data for detecting possible intrusions.

According to a notification sent to affected customers, Microsoft said that “a bug in one of Microsoft’s internal monitoring agents resulted in a malfunction in some of the agents when uploading log data to our internal logging platform” between September 2 and September 19.

The notification said that the logging outage was not caused by a security incident, and “only affected the collection of log events.”

Business Insider first reported the loss of log data earlier in October. Details of the notification have not been widely reported. As noted by security researcher Kevin Beaumont, the notifications that Microsoft sent to affected companies are likely accessible only to a handful of users with tenant admin rights.

[…]

The affected products include Microsoft Entra, Sentinel, Defender for Cloud, and Purview, according to the Business Insider report.

[…]

The logging outage comes a year after Microsoft came under fire from federal investigators for withholding security logs from certain U.S. federal government departments that host their emails on the company’s hardened, government-only cloud; investigators said having access to those logs could have identified a series of China-backed intrusions far sooner.

The China-backed intruders, referred to as Storm-0558, broke into Microsoft’s network and stole a digital skeleton key that allowed the hackers unfettered access to U.S. government emails stored in Microsoft’s cloud

[…]

Following the China-backed hacks, Microsoft said it would start providing logs to its lower-paid cloud accounts from September 2023.

Source: Microsoft said it lost weeks of security logs for its customers’ cloud products | TechCrunch

Cloud problems scale so very very well. Everyone has a problem if your cloud provider has one.

Microsoft applies fix for new Outlook desktop crashes

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Microsoft’s Outlook app is crashing for European users due to memory problems, Redmond has warned, and evidence suggests the problems are spreading to the US.

“We’re investigating an issue in which users in Europe may be experiencing crashing, not receiving emails or observing high memory usage when using the Outlook client,” Redmond warned.

“We’re analyzing data from customers experiencing crashes and high memory usage when using the New Outlook desktop app. We’re reviewing service telemetry and reproducing the issue internally to develop a mitigation plan.”

So far, there is no word on Microsoft’s plan, but social media reports suggest the US East Coast at least is suffering similar problems. Downdetector indicates the issue appears to be spreading.

“It’s been spreading across the country like the common cold now, and I can’t seem to figure out what is causing it,” reported one user. “There have been no changes to the environment and no updates to the Windows desktops that are having this issue.”

Microsoft’s engineers are working on the issue and trying to find out what the problem is. It’s not a good look for a software giant’s main email system.

[…]

Source: Microsoft applies fix for Outlook crashes • The Register

The new Outlook app is absolutely a downgrade in every way from the old one.

Major IT outage hits Microsoft Azure and Office365 users worldwide leading to cancelled flights, stock exchange outages and more chaos. What a great idea cloud is for critical infrastructure!

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Companies and banks worldwide have been reportedly hit by a mass IT outage, leading to grounded flights.

A major IT outage has reportedly hit banks, media outlets, and airlines on Friday, causing chaos at airport check-in and cancelled flights.

The outage is believed to be caused by an outage of Microsoft’s Azure and Office365 services.

Airlines such as Qantas in Australia and at least two low-cost carriers in the US – Frontier and Sun Country Airlines – have been forced to ground flights.

In Europe, users of Ryanair’s app and website also complained and not being able to check in on Friday morning, with a surge of reports noted on the outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

Source: Major IT outage hits Microsoft users worldwide leading to cancelled flights and chaos | Euronews

Slack Will Begin Deleting Older Content From Free Workspaces

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Slack announced a significant change to its platform, saying it will “begin deleting messages and files more than one year old from free workspaces on a rolling basis.”

Slack’s prior policy involved keeping messages and files for the lifetime of a free workspace, although accessing that full history required switching to a paid account. Under the new policy, Slack reserves the right to delete content from free workspaces after one year.

Slack will no longer keep messages and files for the lifetime of your free workspace. Starting August 26, 2024, Customer Data — such as messages and file history — older than one year may be deleted on a rolling basis from workspaces on the free plan, following the terms described in the Main Services Agreement and Trust and Compliance Documentation.

If you choose to remain on a free workspace, you’ll have full access to the past 90 days of message and file history, and the remaining 275 days will become available should you upgrade to a paid plan. If you decide to upgrade, we’ll store messages and files based on your chosen retention period, with an option to keep all history.

Users interested in keeping their full history of content should upgrade to a paid workspace before August 26, 2024. Once deletion occurs, messages and files cannot be recovered.

Source: Slack Will Begin Deleting Older Content From Free Workspaces

This is a problem with cloud services – you do not own or manage the data or the rules with which it is kept.

Microsoft admits no guarantee that UK policing data will stay in the UK and at all private – are you looking, EU member states?!

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According to correspondence released by the Scottish Police Authority (SPA) under freedom of information (FOI) rules, Microsoft is unable to guarantee that data uploaded to a key Police Scotland IT system – the Digital Evidence Sharing Capability (DESC) – will remain in the UK as required by law.

While the correspondence has not been released in full, the disclosure reveals that data hosted in Microsoft’s hyperscale public cloud infrastructure is regularly transferred and processed overseas; that the data processing agreement in place for the DESC did not cover UK-specific data protection requirements; and that while the company has the ability to make technical changes to ensure data protection compliance, it is only making these changes for DESC partners and not other policing bodies because “no one else had asked”.

The correspondence also contains acknowledgements from Microsoft that international data transfers are inherent to its public cloud architecture. As a result, the issues identified with the Scottish Police will equally apply to all UK government users, many of whom face similar regulatory limitations on the offshoring of data.

[…]

Nicky Stewart, a former ICT chief at the UK government’s Cabinet Office, said most people with knowledge of how hyperscale public cloud works have known about these data sovereignty issues for years.

“It’s clearly going to be a concern to any police force that’s using Microsoft, but it’s wider than that,” she said, adding that while Part 3 of the Data Protection Act (DPA) 2018 clearly stipulates that law enforcement data needs to be kept in the UK, other kinds of public sector data must also be kept sovereign under the new G-Cloud 14 framework, which has introduced a UK-only data hosting requirement.

[…]

Microsoft’s commitment to not access customer data without permission is further complicated by the terms of service, which make that promise strictly conditional by giving the company the ability to access data without permission if they either have to fulfil a legal burden, such as responding to government requests for data, or to maintain the service.

[…]

He added that given Microsoft’s disclosures to the SPA, “it must now be obvious that M365 and Azure Cloud services do not meet the two key requirements” to be a legal processor or sub-processor of law enforcement data under the DPA 18.

“These are: one, to conduct all processing and support activities 100% from inside the UK; and two, to only make an international transfer if they are specifically instructed to make the particular transfer by the controller,” he said.

“Microsoft have confirmed that they do not and cannot commit to requirement one for their M365 services, or indeed for most of the services they operate and support in Azure. They have also said that they cannot ‘operationalise’ individual requests as required of them under section 59(7) of the act, thus failing to meet requirement two.

“There can be no clearer evidence than Microsoft’s own clarifications that they cannot meet the legal requirements for a processor or sub-processor of law enforcement data.”

Stewart said: “If it’s not possible to understand the simple question, ‘do you know where your data is all the time?’, then you probably shouldn’t be putting your data in that platform.”

[…]

Source: Microsoft admits no guarantee of sovereignty for UK policing data | Computer Weekly

With the EU and also some EU domain name registrars (looking at you, SIDN) working with these crazy cloud providers, it should have been blindingly obvious that putting data in a US cloud provider would open it up for US spying and a complete lack of data ownership. However idiots will be idiots.

Google Cloud accidentally deletes UniSuper’s online account with 620k customers due to ‘unprecedented misconfiguration’

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More than half a million UniSuper fund members went a week with no access to their superannuation accounts after a “one-of-a-kind” Google Cloud “misconfiguration” led to the financial services provider’s private cloud account being deleted, Google and UniSuper have revealed.

Services began being restored for UniSuper customers on Thursday, more than a week after the system went offline. Investment account balances would reflect last week’s figures and UniSuper said those would be updated as quickly as possible.

The UniSuper CEO, Peter Chun, wrote to the fund’s 620,000 members on Wednesday night, explaining the outage was not the result of a cyber-attack, and no personal data had been exposed as a result of the outage. Chun pinpointed Google’s cloud service as the issue.

In an extraordinary joint statement from Chun and the global CEO for Google Cloud, Thomas Kurian, the pair apologised to members for the outage, and said it had been “extremely frustrating and disappointing”.

They said the outage was caused by a misconfiguration that resulted in UniSuper’s cloud account being deleted, something that had never happened to Google Cloud before.

“Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian has confirmed that the disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription,” the pair said.

“This is an isolated, ‘one-of-a-kind occurrence’ that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud’s clients globally. This should not have happened. Google Cloud has identified the events that led to this disruption and taken measures to ensure this does not happen again.”

While UniSuper normally has duplication in place in two geographies, to ensure that if one service goes down or is lost then it can be easily restored, because the fund’s cloud subscription was deleted, it caused the deletion across both geographies.

UniSuper was able to eventually restore services because the fund had backups in place with another provider.

“These backups have minimised data loss, and significantly improved the ability of UniSuper and Google Cloud to complete the restoration,” the pair said.

[…]

Source: Google Cloud accidentally deletes UniSuper’s online account due to ‘unprecedented misconfiguration’ | Superannuation | The Guardian