Yeah, Azure is a mess today. Can't do anything without the portal.
Tell HN: Azure outage
801–810 of 841 posts
Re: Tell HN: Azure outage
#802Language models aren't perfect; they can still generate similar outputs. Invertibility is a stretch.
Re: Tell HN: Azure outage
#803Language models aren't perfect; they can still generate similar outputs. Invertibility is a stretch.
wrong thread
Re: Tell HN: Azure outage
#804Preliminary post incident review: https://azure.status.microsoft/en-gb/status/history/ Timeline 15:45 UTC on 29 October 2025 – Customer impact began. 16:04 UTC on 29 October 2025 – Investigation commenced following monitoring alerts being triggered. 16:15 UTC on 29 October 2025 – We began the investigation and started to examine configuration changes within AFD. 16:18 UTC on 29 October 2025 – Initial communication po…
33 minutes from impact to status page for a complete outage is a joke.
AWS either is “on it” or you they will say something somewhere between 60-90 minutes after impact.
We should be lucky MSFT is so consistent!
Hug ops to the Azure team, since management is shredding up talent over there.
Re: Tell HN: Azure outage
#805Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still feel lost just trying to view my application logs. I don't want to pay for or lock myself into, "Azure Insights". I just want to see the logging, that I know if I can remember the right buttons to click, are available. The worst place to try is "Monitoring > Logs", this is where you get faced up front with a query designer. I've never worked out how to do a simple "list by time" on that query designer, but it…
A lot of Azure Insights is a value add on top of OTel. You can use "just" OTel feeding Azure Insights (and that's what the modern Aspire-influenced defaults mostly do) and possibly avoid that feeling of vendor lockin. That perspective might also give you ideas of other "modern" vendors to audition such as Grafana if you wanted to see what other people are doing with OTel rather than Event Logs and file system logs.
I love that OTel exists, but I've always been confused why OTel even existed. If I were running a cloud provider, I'd put a "skunkworks" team on all things observability and log management a decade ago, and make their product free to use. It's not critical-path on infrastructure, so it's not a correlated risk other than the investment in manpower, but it dramatically changes how user-friendly your web interface is, and how likely people are to use it daily vs. managing things over command line or with third-party interfaces.
By bringing those eyeballs onto your cloud console, you're creating infinitely more opportunities for branded interaction and discovery of your other cloud products - you could even quantify these eyeballs as you would ad inventory! There should have been an arms race for each cloud provider to have the best log-tailing and log-searching and log-aggregation system imaginable. OTel could have been killed before it began, because Honeycomb and its other originators would have been acquired years ago and made specific locked-in value-adds for each cloud.
But nobody had this foresight, and thus comments like yours are absolutely correct. OTel is a blessing and I love the tools coming out. But from a cloud provider's perspective, it's a massive missed opportunity that continues to be missed.
Re: Tell HN: Azure outage
#806Preliminary post incident review: https://azure.status.microsoft/en-gb/status/history/ Timeline 15:45 UTC on 29 October 2025 – Customer impact began. 16:04 UTC on 29 October 2025 – Investigation commenced following monitoring alerts being triggered. 16:15 UTC on 29 October 2025 – We began the investigation and started to examine configuration changes within AFD. 16:18 UTC on 29 October 2025 – Initial communication po…
33 minutes from impact to status page for a complete outage is a joke.
As a technologist, you should always avoid MS. Even if they have a best-in-class solution for some domain, they will use that to leverage you into their absolute worst-in-class ecosystem.
Re: Tell HN: Azure outage
#807Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd think any SeriousBusiness would have a backup way to take customers' money. This is the one thing you always want to be able to do: accept payment. If they made it so they can't do that, they deserve the hit to their revenue. People should just walk out of the store with the goods if they're not being charged. Why doesn't someone in the store at least have one of those manual kachunk-kachunk carbon copy card re…
I think a lot of payment terminals have an option to record transactions offline and upload them later, but apparently it's not enabled by default - probably because it increases your risk that someone pays with a bad card.
After having my credit card locked by stupid fraud prevention algorithms on my honeymoon, I had a long chat with them before going overseas a second time.
And that was the day Visa had a full on outage. We would walk into one shop, try to buy stuff, get declined, then go into the next and get accepted because they were running in offline mode.
Got a nice big bill from my cellphone carrier for making the call to visa to ask them wtf as well.
Re: Tell HN: Azure outage
#808Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd think any SeriousBusiness would have a backup way to take customers' money. This is the one thing you always want to be able to do: accept payment. If they made it so they can't do that, they deserve the hit to their revenue. People should just walk out of the store with the goods if they're not being charged. Why doesn't someone in the store at least have one of those manual kachunk-kachunk carbon copy card re…
The kachunk-kachunk credit card machines need raised digits on the cards, and I don't think most banks have been issuing those for years at this point. Mine have been smooth for at least 10 years.
My credit union has been behind for a while. I think I had an embossed one until about nine years ago. Six at the latest. Still doesn’t have NFC in it.
Re: Tell HN: Azure outage
#809Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Germany many stores still accept cash and some even only accept cash and we are ridiculed for this... Seems like one of the rare instances where this is useful :D
It's sad the number of stores I've seen where they just shut down when they can't use the checkout machines; the clerks aren't allowed to do math even if they could. Whereas the smaller, owner-run stores have more leeway; the local tiny grocery "sold" all freezer/refrigerator food for cheap/free during a power failure. The big Walmart closed and threw everything away the next day.
The odd thing is that the US has been teaching math using the “in your head” heuristic (New Math) for almost 20 years and yet young adults cannot make change without the machine to save their lives.
God help me if I hand someone $25 for a $14.75 total. I’m getting small bills back.
I wonder what they teach in Germany.
Re: Tell HN: Azure outage
#810Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of Azure Insights is a value add on top of OTel. You can use "just" OTel feeding Azure Insights (and that's what the modern Aspire-influenced defaults mostly do) and possibly avoid that feeling of vendor lockin. That perspective might also give you ideas of other "modern" vendors to audition such as Grafana if you wanted to see what other people are doing with OTel rather than Event Logs and file system logs.
I love that OTel exists, but I've always been confused why OTel even existed. If I were running a cloud provider, I'd put a "skunkworks" team on all things observability and log management a decade ago, and make their product free to use. It's not critical-path on infrastructure, so it's not a correlated risk other than the investment in manpower, but it dramatically changes how user-friendly your web interface is, a…
> By bringing those eyeballs onto your cloud console, you're creating infinitely more opportunities for branded interaction and discovery of your other cloud products - you could even quantify these eyeballs as you would ad inventory! There should have been an arms race for each cloud provider to have the best log-tailing and log-searching and log-aggregation system imaginable. OTel could have been killed before it began, because Honeycomb and its other originators would have been acquired years ago and made specific locked-in value-adds for each cloud.
I think that's what Application Insights has always been, Azure's free-to-start, suggest-out-of-the-box Honeycomb. App Insights had a long slow road away from Microsoft-specific log and metrics ingesters that weren't OTel, but it is hard to argue that standard ingestors are a bad idea. App Insights still downplays that it can be "just a Honeycomb" using only OTel sources and still encourages "secret sauce" ingestors in addition to OTel ones. App Insights is a small moat (around a data lake; to mix metaphors). That said, it's also a standards-supporting tool now as well.
It's not been as clear of an arms race because AWS and GCP didn't invest in it in a similar way and it mostly impacted what are often called "dark matter" teams (Microsoft shops doing "boring" stuff that rarely makes HN headlines), but I have worked in teams that absolutely favored Azure over AWS/GCP with one of the reasons being Application Insights was an easy install and powerful first-party supported tool rather than an extra third party vendor relationship like Grafana/Honeycomb/Dynatrace/etc.