Microsoft will still charge you money for Exchange SE, and occasionally release security and other bug fixes, but “supported” is an extremely generous description of the state of the product.

Exchange should be well protected behind a firewall or 10 after all these years.

What this leaves is a comparison of whether on-premise exchange servers have been compromised or down compared to the cloud.

I would hope that enough hardening has happened over the last 20 or 30 years.

Yep, same here from Germany.

From the Health Status page:

"Microsoft Teams: Most of the core functionality including joining calls, meetings, group chats, and channel messages are not impacted. Scenarios that depend on Exchange Online, including Calendar related failures with scheduling, invites, viewing, and meeting edits. Creation of Live or Virtual events fail. Failures with Copilot responses for outlook, calendar, or M365 files, read history, or adding to new chats. Navigating to App chats, adding new contacts or syncing contacts in settings fail. Standard channels are working fine but users may experience the inability to create or delete private or shared channels."

I suspect that the search is broken because it relies on the exchange bits to find users.

Teams relies on Exchange API to autocomplete your search for colleagues, if you know someone's full email you should be able to start it that way.

> What is driving me nuts is that we still heavily rely on email.

That itself wouldn't be a problem - email is very decentralised.

The problem is that we thought that putting like 2 companies in charge of most email communication is a good idea.

Meanwhile we were very happy that we mainly rely on email. We were still able to send out urgent messages (like "sorry if we don't reply, Microsoft is down, you can reach us by [phone] or [backup email]") via SMTP and if we really needed to receive some email, we'd be able to set up a secondary MX record to a holding server in about an hour.

If we were mainly using Teams or whatever other "better than email" service and that had an outage, we'd actually be in the dark!

As the resident complainer about Microsoft lock-in, I was honestly quite surprised by how well we could work around this. Don't get me wrong, if it was Entra that fell over, we'd be thoroughly fucked, but Exchange wasn't all that bad.

What’s worse is how many things force an email second factor now. No choice to make a TOTP or to use a passkey (which, with biometrics securing it, is two friggin factors at once, and should be all we need for anything that isn’t nuclear secrets!!!! Sorry this just kills me with every SaaS product I have to “two-factor” to daily).

Your email is down? Cool now you can’t log into anything.

Email has been quite robust over the past~ 30 years. Exchange is just email by Microsoft so of course it'll be more brittle.

It’s interesting how relative this is, reading by the comments and stories around them. A previous coworker started computing in the punch card era and would tell stories of dropping your stack of cards and having to reorder them, using the printouts to debug, and so on. And helping develop what’s now known as fork() for processes (although it predated fork and he had his own name for it), and helping develop a commercial RDBMS before they existed all in a non tech industry career.

So when I read about Exchange Server to me it still feels quite modern.

Don't frame it as a negative. This is what it feels like to know things that other people don't know.

To test our code changes, we would check out a VM that was running Microsoft Windows Server edition which was a beefy VM that was running Exchange. It was a carbon copy of the server running in production.

The Exchange code base frankly was a behemoth. No one had a full understanding of how it worked E2E. I am just sharing how I understood it. I was only a lowly L63 btw.

I doubt it has something to do with being old, running an email server of any kind, let alone knowing how email works, let alone using email, have been all various abstractions to help make users into consumers who pay more than people who know how to build and run this infrastructure.

There's Skype for Business SE too. They've recently brought back the group chat feature.

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This is common knowledge. Try googling EdgeTransport.exe and you should see the outdated documentation for Exchange Server on-Prem.

It’s a distributed system with thousands of servers with automatic update distribution and config change distribution. Bad changes can propagate across the entire system though Microsoft status updates say they didn’t see any change that seemed relevant. It could also be a bug across all the uniform code that somehow triggered. For example Cisco BE servers once had a firmware bug that after 32767 hours the fans would all run at 100% speed.

Microsoft product reliability has been a running joke since the company started launching products. Why would anything change just because they pivoted to managed services instead of shipping install media?

I don't know what OP means. The deployment pipeline takes weeks or the release process?

The latter is probably the case for most enterprises.

Getting releases deployed into the testing environments, much less production, requires coordination, testing, reports and sign-offs.

Of course this can normally be expedited or bypassed for incident management and critical fixes.

All I see today is middle managers using an e-mail outage as an excuse for not getting things done yesterday.

Pick. Up. The. God. Damned. Phone. And do your job.

It's not about outlook the mailing app. They called their SaaS e-mail Outlook, you can use it without using Windows, in the same way as Gmail. Pretty popular in the corporate world

A large majority of companies I've worked for over the last 30+ years used Outlook and Exchange Server, or now M$365, for email, even in those cases when my actual work was on Linux. The exception were those that used Gmail...

Many, many big companies do, and some universities also moved to MS365 when Google downgraded their free campus agreement, because they were already paying for MS365 for Office and that came with cloud storage and outlook.

> I must live in a bubble... the last time I heard of anyone using Outlook was when Scott McNealy was calling it LookOut! in the 90s. [...] In a ~35 year tech career I have never been exposed to, nor used Windows nor Outlook and have never met anyone who does.

Yes, then you probably at least work in a bubble.

In my experience, it's more common than GSuite in most companies outside of startups and big tech and is ubiquitous at schools, among many, many other entities.

Most of the Fortune 500?

Sounds like you live in the Silicon Valley bubble. I don’t have a stat but I would wager that most businesses (especially larger ones) run on outlook/exchange.

You have probably mostly worked for tech companies where business employees were not the primary workforce. When you think about it most other business generally have everyone needing a word, excel or PowerPoint. It bundles cleanly with the whole package.

Windows is still by far the most popular OS for employees at big companies. Using Microsoft's SharePoint/Outlook/etc is also extremely common.

I'm assuming your "surprise" isn't genuine.

Every non tech company uses outlook, basically.

It's interesting what kind of bubbles people live in.

You are absolutely living in a bubble. The vast vast majority of US companies are using both Windows and Outlook.

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I’m with you. I took a job in finance at one point, reporting to the CTO. On the first day they showed me my desk, a windows machine. I had not used it since high school, and not seriously then. It just never occurred to me that you would have engineers use windows (all the trading systems were Linux).

The CTO had to pull a bunch of strings to let me run Linux.