The reality for most companies, up until now at least, is that if they manage email servers themselves they will have more annualized downtime than if Microsoft does it. Of course if this outage lasts long enough (who knows what's going on over there), that will stop being true.

IMHO a bigger concern is that Russia hacked Microsoft in 2022 and China hacked Microsoft in 2023. Even that wasn't enough to scare companies off MS.

Basically, MS customers are locked in, the cost of migrating to anything else is huge, and there's a "no-one gets fired for buying MS" herd mentality, so MS has little to lose no matter how hard their product fails, just like Cloudstrike.

There's also the question of what alternative would really be better, or at least more reliable. My impression is that Google's infrastructure and engineering are genuinely better, but I'm recently ex-Google so take that with a grain of salt.

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Ungh a day ago | parent | next [-]

That's really not true though. That's what the cloud companies told us.

We've had more downtime from all our SaaS and cloud services in the last year than the 20 years before when self hosting.

	▲	doubled112 a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		When we self hosted, we very rarely had an unplanned outage. It really shouldn’t happen all the time. Plus I could work planned outages around the company’s schedule. Now it feels like something is always down.
	▲	venzaspa a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That's all predicated on having a team of people with the appropriate knowledge of how to securely self host an email system. Some organisations aren't big enough for that to be worthwhile, others have decided to forego that cost to let the cloud providers pick it up. Email is not a particularly easy thing to reliably host and secure for a sizable organisation, especially if its not your main focus.

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fuussssip a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Annualized outage minutes is the wrong metric. If my company's email is down for fifteen minutes, twice a day, at 2am and 3am, that's over a week of downtime. But we might not even care.

If I lose a whole day, we lose all the productivity for that day and delay countless upstream and downstream efforts by a day.

The distribution of those minutes matters.

	▲	roca 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's true, but it's more true for some companies than others. A lot of big companies cross time zones. I suppose "unplanned outage minutes" would be a better metric. I still expect most companies to be worse on that metric. Most companies are just bad at running services reliably, especially when it's not their core business.