Microsoft Teams down for thousands of users

It's hard to understand why Teams is so bad. They have all these engineers, and it's not like it's difficult to make a chat program. Teleconferencing, sure, that's difficult. But most of the problems I hear about is "Teams crashed" or "Wouldn't connect" or "Makes my machine run unbearably slow". How do you end up with such a crap app? And why is the interface so terrible? Can't they afford UX people? And why are there only 6 emoji reacts? Do they realize that people prefer Slack because the experience is better?

On top of all that, if you don't have a "Microsoft/Office365 Business" account, you can't even connect/join a meeting from a handful of clients, depending on if you're chatting or teleconferencing. Only Chrome/Edge works on browser, I can't remember if Android works at all without a business account, the Linux client kinda works? It was such a pain when I tried to interview with a Teams-using org that I think I just sent them a Zoom invite, which of course just works everywhere.

Coders everywhere suddenly become more productive...

unaffected atm - team members in CA, FL and CT

> They have all these engineers, and it's not like it's difficult to make a chat program. Teleconferencing, sure, that's difficult.

FWIW, the UI of your average teleconferencing app is way simpler than a chat app and the state is only relevant in the moment which makes both the front end and backend easier to design due to a lack of search or history. The actual "conferencing" parts of a teleconferencing stack, both the client and the servers, are also nigh unto commodities at this point (as Google open sourced the tech for almost all of the hard problems they solved for Hangouts), while figuring out how to better index file attachments people throw into chat discussions isn't exactly a solved problem.

I don't think many programmers are working at this hour (23:39 here on the East Coast).