"The Register asked Microsoft how it validates its changes and what assurance it could give customers that this issue won't be repeated. The company is yet to respond."

Saying f'all means they'll do f'all.

Get me one of those.... --->

I'm preparing for a meeting, or rather should be (instead I'm reading ElReg).

"The Register asked Microsoft how it validates its changes and what assurance it could give customers that this issue won't be repeated. The company is yet to respond."

Maybe they asked by email? ;)

Microsoft are still trying to copy Apple.

They'll start by blanking El Reg. Then they'll make things even more expensive. Making products somewhat reliable is a long way down the list.

50 years ago and still can't do email.

"If the company has gone all-in on Microsoft's cloud email services"

To quote a.s.r.

All software evolves till it can send email... except for microsoft exchange.

"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?"

My derision for Microsoft knows no bounds. lolol as they say in the classics.

Still their customers continue to fund this ineptitude. Karma.

Probably no skilled staff left to do the testing.

Outlook QA Manager: "Can you guys stop banging aways at those keyboards? You are never going to manage Hamlet. Give us hand over here."

From article: does Microsoft test its changes before deploying to production?

They USED to...

The testing department got "mostly pink-slipped" about a year before Win-10-nic released, according to grok. The tester to developer ratio was dropped from 2:1 to about 1:1, and the developer role apparently became "tester/developer" (or similar). They BASICALLY decided to rely on insiders, home users, etc. to validate their "cram it up your xxx" forced updates before getting the enterprise users updated. THAT has been their new model, ever since.

The orange, rasi winning, former entertainer, and his soap box derby car maker, hanger on are destroying trust in the US as a trust worthy partner for data, business, or anything really. That is on top of a series of headwinds including, anti competitive practices finally getting fines, the slow realisation that subscriptions are not always better value, and the self owns from providers like Microsoft. Some of the more cautious organisations who's workloads that are not yet in the cloud, and some who are finding less utility and more cost in their cloud deployments may be considering keeping upgrades on their own systems in their own data centers (DCs) or moving back out of the cloud. This is not yet a large scale movement but if Microsoft keep hiking prices and going down and the US doesn't remove uncertainty over security and other partnerships some of those clouds might condense and the workloads may rain down on organisations own DCs and co location providers.

There was another MS outage last night that broke incoming email into Office 365.

They're testing it on you, and this seems to work perfectly.

I'm sure Micros~1 asked their buddies over at OpenAI about this, and ChatGPT said all would be fine!

Is it just me? I read that as outrage...

disclosure:- I don't use outlook, just an interested observer.

Updating, or not, should always be a choice.

From apps that take existing features to make them "premium extras" or add even more intrusive advertising, to MICROS~1's continuing inability to properly test the shit that it releases (and a special shout out here to HP for their firmware updates)....all updates should be highly recommended, yes, scream that the sky may fall even, but always always let the user say "don't".

(and it would help greatly if all updates said what has actually been changed/done/fixed instead of some mindless twaddle about enhancing the user experience or, worse, "Some bugs fixed")

Microsoft is forcing updates now? Why are you ranting about something that isn't happening?

If I read the article correctly, this was an issue with Microsoft's own systems which affected webmail access.

A forced update on end users wasn't involved.

Gee, no problems with LMDE6.

And they think people are going to pay to upgrade to a Windows 11 box instead of jumping ship to Linux or BSD... *LOL*

If jumping ship to Linux or BSD was a business option, Borkzilla would already be dead.

Business is tied to Windows by the neck, the hands, the feet and the balls.

And Redmond knows it.

Whilst I agree in the short term (and given most consultants tenure/ managers bonus timelines that seems to be all that counts) most businesses cant simply un-tether from Microsoft that it is not a small undertaking. It is however possible there are many businesses who's back-end is primarily Oracle Linux, Red Hat, IBM system i, or even open source. Some newer businesses allow their employees to use not only windows, mac or Linux to work on but also mobile os on phones or tablets. Established businesses or those that have built up a more recent dependency on client side software that is windows only as well as those who work in fields where the school college and university education of staff prepare them to do job x with y program on windows do have a cultural challenge as well on the client side but desktop, dhcp, DNS, Kerberos, LDAP, SQL, Email, word processing, accounting, analytics and whatever else Microsoft claim to deliver can be done by others. Microsoft dominates now but no one thought computers would replace typewrites, no one thought anyone would rival IBM, I am not saying it will be anytime soon or the user-base has given any indication it will be because of bad service, I am just saying they are not immune to change in the market and if something else comes along they might not be dominant forever.

How about Apple? I keep seeing people with Apple corporate laptops so it must be feasible for someone.

How about Apple? I keep seeing people with Apple corporate laptops so it must be feasible for someone

Speaking as someone who does Mac support (amongst other things) - they mostly use the MS Office stuff as local clients, not the webbified stuff (which is only used as a backup if their machine is down for some reason..)

Remember folks, a large portion of the world relies on M$ and their entertaining and wily ways of fantasy quality control.

I'm sure this will end well! ------------------------------------------>>>>>>>>>

That is all.

Requirement

"Make X do Y"

Agile process to do the above

Testing - does X to Y..... yes. release

No do all existing tests complete correctly as they should

This company just cannot write email software properly. Actually, they can't write any software properly. Windows/office has become so large and unwieldy that they themselves don't know how to make it work any more. And they don't need to do testing. People are used to shite service, so that's what they get.

The difference between Microsoft and Apple is that Microsoft keep steering their customers into corners, making them stop using X, start using Y etc. Apple just don't do it so blatantly and so much. There's no part of Apple's MacOS that tells you off for trying to use Chrome instead of Safari in the same way that Windows tells you off for using Chrome instead of Edge. That's just one example.

Their QA is the most appalling QA in the industry. They're bullies, and they're greedy bullies. A bit like HP.

I don't always test, but when I do test, I test in production.

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?

Short answer: No.

Longer, more detailed answer: Of course not!

Next question?

The web version of Outlook as an absolute car-crash at the best of times; and it gets worse with every single update . The composition editor is now so buggy as to be virtually unusable.

Yeah, all it needs to do is be 1000X worse and it'll be as bad as the classic version of Outlook.

I'm counting the days until it's no longer supported. that's exactly what the corporate IT departments need as an excuse to remove it from everything. Then we'll be free from having to make all the HTML emails IE 5 compatible (yes, seriously).

Might this not also have affected users of the "New Outlook" desktop App ? Isn't it just a fancy interface to webmail, or do I have this wrong ?

At least IMAP/SMTP might give an alternative. If Microsoft's email client ever abandons them, it'd be webmail or nothing :-(

"does Microsoft test its changes before deploying to production?"

Well no, given that its employees are beginning to be drawn from the same immature children behind DOGE.

QA costs money and on a balance sheet has no practical value, as Microsoft and many others have switched to let the users do the testing, not like they will get any financial penalties?