Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Over 170k Nonprofits Lost All Their Data. Is Microsoft to Blame?

slate.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 166 posts

Re: Over 170k Nonprofits Lost All Their Data. Is Microsoft to Blame?

#121

Post by iamniels »

This is wrong on so many levels. First of all, IT admins receive weekly e-mails from AWS, Google and MS that a certain service will shut down and that it will affect operations. In 90% of the cases, these e-mails are sent to all customers instead of only the affected customers, so admins get alarm fatigue.

Secondly, instead of doing a rug pull, what's wrong with a 2-month brownout period? Only allow the admin to login, put OneDrive in read-only mode. That will alert all users clearly.

Thirdly instead of fending of the questions from slate.com with Orwellian corporate speak, they should acknowledge their mistake and spend a couple of weeks of the highly paid engineers to see whether they can recover the data. Why is it always so hard for MS to say "Sorry, we made a mistake".

Re: Over 170k Nonprofits Lost All Their Data. Is Microsoft to Blame?

#122

Post by rvba »

rectang wrote: post #105

Why not start with a brownout? Make the data temporarily inaccessible, but don’t actually delete it immediately.

Satya has to go. It feels he is there to keep costs low, not to do things correctly.

One of the first moves was to get rid of QA

Re: Over 170k Nonprofits Lost All Their Data. Is Microsoft to Blame?

#123

Post by rvba »

oofabz wrote: post #115
dh2022 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a Financial Analyst at Amazon and Starbucks for about 15 years total. Excel was my favorite tool. I used to say that if my employer would not pay for Excel I would pay for it out of me own money. Almost 20 years later in 2026 I migrated all my personal stuff to Linux and Libre Office. I am amazed how much better this is than the Windows + Office setup my wife uses. Just today I helped my wife with an Excel file…

I was shocked when I imported a 1.5M row dataset into Office365 Excel and found that it had silently cropped my data to 1048576 rows. One million items is a ridiculously low limit for a modern computer, and deleting 1/3 of my data without any warning is unacceptable. 20 years ago Excel could handle 1.5 million rows without breaking a sweat but this webpage version isn't real Excel. So I used Gnumeric instead and it w…

Excel has a limit of 1M rows now just like it 20 years ago.

The 2003 version had a 64k row limit.

I agree with what you write though: limit could be increased + webpage version is pure garbage.

Re: Over 170k Nonprofits Lost All Their Data. Is Microsoft to Blame?

#124

Post by cavem0nkey »

snayan wrote: post #95
cavem0nkey wrote: post #38

No Microsoft is not to blame. Whoever sells themselves into an all encompassing ecosystem with no exit plan or backup is to blame. It’s absolutely stupid thinking even if it’s the norm these days. The cloud is a convenience at most and an expensive one. You do everything you need to do somewhere else and pray that no one else gets in or you get shot. This is a warning to everyone else. Heed it.

Brother, you are living in a bubble. This article is about a group of people who are trying to make the world a better place in their own little way. Many of them do not have the technical skillset to understand the potential future problems they have since run into. Many of them, as you acknowledged, probably chose this option for convenience. Is it ideal? No. Is it the reality of the world we live in? Yes. A bit of…

Sorry if the tone was off but I'm trying to peel off the layers of narrative on this and get to the real story. And that is the all too common story of a combination of poorly defined and enforced policy by a vendor and a strategy of hope and ignorance from a customer.

The non-profit part of it is moot. This could happen to anyone. I'm more than a little annoyed that "non-profit" and "charity" is used to shape opinion. Having worked for a charity before, they aren't necessarily the bastions of moral virtue even when claiming non-profit status. I've seen cash efficiencies so low that there's almost no point in them existing. Not that it matters, again because this problem applies to non-profit and profit organisations.

Thus this should be a warning to people here to make sure that you have an exit plan and a strategy if you use the services regardless of who you are or what you do. Not hatred of the vendor. Because every single vendor out there can arbitrarily cut you off from a service at their will through automation, incompetence or malicious behaviour and there's probably nothing you can do about it.

Re: Over 170k Nonprofits Lost All Their Data. Is Microsoft to Blame?

#125

Post by cavem0nkey »

tomhow wrote: post #49
cavem0nkey wrote: post #38

No Microsoft is not to blame. Whoever sells themselves into an all encompassing ecosystem with no exit plan or backup is to blame. It’s absolutely stupid thinking even if it’s the norm these days. The cloud is a convenience at most and an expensive one. You do everything you need to do somewhere else and pray that no one else gets in or you get shot. This is a warning to everyone else. Heed it.

Please avoid this kind of scolding, berating tone on HN, and omit sneers, swipes, and name-calling from comments. The guidelines make it clear we're here for curious conversation, not this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry I didn't feel this was scolding but I look back and see it may be taken that way.

The nature of the comment was that we should strip the narrative about this being a non-profit from the discussion and apply what is left to ourselves. It acts as a warning that we should really evaluate and consider our trust relations with a vendor who has control over everything that we do. And make sure we don't make the same mistakes.

Re: Over 170k Nonprofits Lost All Their Data. Is Microsoft to Blame?

#127

Post by KronisLV »

iamniels wrote: post #121

This is wrong on so many levels. First of all, IT admins receive weekly e-mails from AWS, Google and MS that a certain service will shut down and that it will affect operations. In 90% of the cases, these e-mails are sent to all customers instead of only the affected customers, so admins get alarm fatigue. Secondly, instead of doing a rug pull, what's wrong with a 2-month brownout period? Only allow the admin to logi…

> Why is it always so hard for MS to say "Sorry, we made a mistake".

Seems like no corpos ever want to say that. Surely it’s not because of some pride or PR? I’m guessing such an admission might also sometimes have legal risks?

Re: Over 170k Nonprofits Lost All Their Data. Is Microsoft to Blame?

#128

Post by verytrivial »

foolinaround wrote: post #83

considering that most non-profits barely have any data, i dont know what MS' incentive is, in not holding on to the data... it definitely must be in the TBs

Someone had an "income per tenant" performance metric perhaps?

Re: Over 170k Nonprofits Lost All Their Data. Is Microsoft to Blame?

#129

Post by verytrivial »

Aeolun wrote: post #116

So they built their thing on free handouts and were surprised that didn’t continue?

Sure, but there's a difference between losing the website hosting your bottomless mimosa brunch school reunion, and a non-profit organisations losing all their shared files after taking up an offer of a no-cost a license from MSFT to support their mission. The nature of the "thing" matters IMO.

Re: Over 170k Nonprofits Lost All Their Data. Is Microsoft to Blame?

#130

Post by verytrivial »

neuroelectron wrote: post #93

This is no accident. Microsoft knew exactly what they're doing, working through notifying and transitioning 170,000 customers is a lot of work. That work isn't free for Microsoft to provide. Cutting them off probably saved them $billions and many years of expensive, partial service deprecation.

Maybe. There's also about five guys at my work who would have loved the opportunity to use an LLM to set up a "non-propfit-brownout-pipeline-orchestrator" to transition 99% of these account to either a newly billable account, or a "bye-bye.zip" export available to the admin account. Two weeks of effort, tops.
Post reply on HN