>A large camp of software developers have genuinely hostile feelings towards Microsoft

which, besides hatred, manifests in malice, like Nightmare Eclipse. I wouldn't be surprised if this outage was an engineer leaving a parting gift, using a bug they probably knew of for years but management didn't allow them to fix.

Wow Nightmare Eclipse is fascinating. It sounds like he is operating in a gray area and could be charged if Germany really wanted to?

Agree. I was having suspicions around that