I *appear* to have email. And I think I possibly even sent one. But I keep seeing people's posts about it still being down, so who knows? I hadn't considered that there would likely be a 3rd "semi-random-broken" state in between "Back to normal" and "totally dead". Of course we're in the 3rd state. Of course.
@sundogplanets I let my work email sit on the "trying to connect' thing for about 2 hours, and then it connected.
Outlook is on "late 90s game server" rules
Microsoft brings back services in tiers and regions - it's a global outage after all.
Systems back online tend to be under heavy load due to lack of redundancy.
I will enjoy a day with little to no emails!
Nov 13, 2026, 1:38 PM@sundogplanets Send postcards
It's the backlog, it's like restarting a power grid, you need to do it stepwise or else 10000 refrigerators will pull it right down again.
Nov 13, 2026, 1:48 PM@sundogplanets the correct term is "intermittent"
@sundogplanets I assume lots of stuff has been queued during the outage and it's now beginning to come through in fits and starts. I suppose we should be grateful email is still store-and-forward under the hood, or I guess things would be even worse.
Schrödinger's Outlook.
The state of working vs being broken does not resolve until you attempt to use it.
@sundogplanets software written by a company that produces a stochastic parrot behaves in a stochastic way
@sundogplanets I have *some* university email this morning (I am probably supposed to be using outlook, but I am resolutely on Thunderbird).
Nov 13, 2026, 2:52 PM@sundogplanets Large distributed systems are always in the third state, it's just usually managed well enough that you don't notice it. 😆
But seriously, look up the CAP theorem if you're curious.
@sundogplanets I received about a dozen emails on my work email so far. One was from JAXA saying their email was down. Several messages reminding of meetings yesterday.
@EricFielding @sundogplanets Someone sent you an e-mail to say their e-mail was down?
Sigh!
About 20 years ago I was Administrative Specialist in an IT department. We had a brief Internet outage, local to our organization. The national office resolved it in an hour or two.
One of our IT guys sent an All Staff e-mail. Let autocorrect review and send, without his OK:
"We apologize for any incontinence this may have caused."
Damn! I'd have sworn nobody reads those things to the end.
@sundogplanets well you don’t have to tell people you have email… just let it play out over the weekend :)
@sundogplanets most recent down detector snap shot
