Like with all stickers that in some way or form convey an opinion, I hesitated to put it on my laptop. After today, any reluctance regarding it's message has vanished.
If you are not reading this on or about October 29th 2025, there was a massive Microsoft outage today. This is shortly following a similar outage with AWS on October 19th.
I'm taking a course on general purpose GPU computing, which so far has been using NVidia's cuda library. We submit the final .exe executable requiring it to be compiled on Windows. I do not have a (modern enough) NVidia GPU for the version of cuda we are to use, as well I do not want to faff about with PCIE pass through for a VM to take advantage of it, even if I were to have one. Fortunately the school provides remote access to the computer lab with Azure Virtual Desktop. While there is no native Linux client, the web interface works fine enough so I make do with it.
I've been very busy the past week and so did not start in earnest on the assignment until today, the day it was due. So I was quite alarmed when I sat down at my desk, preparing to hunker down for the next few hours and complete the assignment, when the webpage (windows.cloud.microsoft) wouldn't load. Surely it's just my NIC acting up again right? Nope!!
Fortunately I had access to a Mac from work and was able to sign in using the "Windows App" client, but man it was a pain using such a tiny screen and not being able to use my keyboard and mouse. Apple's move to only having type-c is one that makes my blood boil.
After a few hours I was able to log in on the webpage and suddenly started making far faster progress than previously. The site was back up and I presumed that would be the end of my troubles. Then I got to work.
I asked my coworker how the outage effected us, he didn't have much to say other than most everything had been resolved by the point I arrived. He left, 30 minutes passed, and then the phone started to ring. A student said office.com was down so they couldn't log into Teams. I directed them to teams.microsoft.com, got them logged in, and sent them on their way. Then 2 minutes later it rings again, another student unable to log into Teams, only being given the option to sign out. I walk them through signing in, and as I'm sending them off I get another call, and then another, and another.
I guess one of the faculty decided the best way to proctor her students' exams was to have them join on their phones with their cameras facing them. Arguably a better idea than lockdown browser, but nevertheless problematic, especially today. Since Microsoft is not as big as AWS, word of the outage did not spread as far and as quickly, and this instructor was none the wiser of how miserable they were making my day.
I won't pretend that I am a local-compute only purist, the site you're reading this on is hosted on a computer in some datacenter I have not an likely will never visit. However, I keep that in mind. I don't use the server for anything else besides this website. Every file on here is backed up on at least 3 devices. I am well aware that this is not my computer, if a rat cuts the wrong wire or a technician pees on the wrong hard drive, everything on it could be lost.
That's not how it's treated by the mainstream.
"The cloud" is treated as infrastructure, like bridges, power plants, and dams. Do failures occur? Yes, but normally with some degree of warning, and with passive safeguards in case it ever does. We have to be able to count on infrastructure being there and operational in order to complete much of anything. The past two weeks alone have shown that is not the case for the cloud. We can't treat the near endless well of computing capability to always be online, outages happen, and that's okay if it's not essential. However, more and more essential services purely exist in "The cloud".
Honestly, I can't really fault my school for not being able to access the computer, since it is at least tied to an actual physical machine on premises. If I really needed to I could have just driven there and logged in.
My work on the other hand deserves all the shame it can get. As the company is pushing to be more and more of an online education program, it has been bit so many times by outages and overages that prevent students from being able to go to participate. Each time the solution is to throw money at the issue, buy another service that supposedly fixes it, or shrug and wait until it is resolved.
Maybe instead of doing that, they invested in some on-prem servers and paid a couple of guys to made sure they stayed on, an AWS outage wouldn't mean a complete halt in providing service.
Beyond that, if each company had to invest time, planning, and real estate into online services instead of just swiping the company card, it's reasonable to believe they may actually care more about the end product. If they had to install a pallet of GPUs in order to have the new AI feature, they may think twice about the new "smart assistant". They may have stronger backup routes, ones that don't involve a web-portal sign-in page, ones that the non-tech-savvy could use. They may look to conquer their slice of the market instead of chasing after unlimited growth and the line moving up and to the right.
I regularly check my email, If I don't respond quickly, send me a poke:
jasco.website@pm.me