In retrospect, the cause and cure are obvious to everyone.
Plenty of internal accounts from previous employees highlight this.
Most of the time we get demonized by resume-driven developers job-hopping every few years (seems like the lack of deep expertise is working out). Today we get to laugh at their expense. These problems were entirely foreseeable and avoidable.
What a great phrase!, can I use that in conversation?
They still don't know why this "core process" is maxing out the processor for no reason.
Site was taken offline, war rooms ensued. 48 hours later, an Ops team from Redmond was flown out. Another three days and they determined it was several legacy servers were going down and the load balancing servers were getting hit so hard, they also failed. It was a cascading effect that killed everything.
CIO was pissed. The company got absolutely lit up on every social media channel for their ineptitude. The CIO vowed it would never happen again, they were upgrading the entire network and infrastructure to avoid it happening again. Fast forward six months to the next major release. Same thing, same panic, same cascading failures because servers were collapsing under the traffic to the website. Another war room, another Ops team flies out. Two days later they figured out it was some buggy code that was causing it.
This after 8 rounds of load balancing testing to the tune of 10X the amount of traffic the site sees on these major release dates without so much as a hiccup.
I left two months later, but the overall feeling was the same - total amateur hour from Microsoft after our company was gifted major discounts to go all in with their hardware & network gear. The company found out the hard way it wasn't a smart decision.
The scary part was this some 20 years ago - seems like not much has changed considering how frequently Github is down now too.
Actual tech write-ups can come later.
I'm sure it's more complicated than that.... but from my POV, which is extremely limited and informed by what others online tell me.... that this is amateur hour
What would it take for it to be professional hour?
You know a lot of talented people who work there also post here, and it's not fair to insinuate that they aren't talented because some vastly complex system somewhere in the world had a bad day.
Stuff happens, things break. That's why lots of nines cost a lot of money. It doesn't automatically mean that anyone is incompetent.
lots of nines means not having significant downtime. we passed 99.99% hours ago, and we're on the way to 99.9%
Almost certainly not the fault of individual people, it's a management failure of course
I agree there are many talented people at Microsoft, but I don’t see the professionalism in this incident.