Sorry, NSA, Microsoft is Down

Summary: Downtime for Microsoft’s servers that cannot stay online 365 days of the year and some news from the government-controlled press, which seems to be staging a DDOS crisis (real or perceived)

Microsoft s Office 360 [1, 2] is having uptime issues again, making it deserving of this name that does not imply 365 days of uptime. Here are some details:

Microsoft’s Outlook, SkyDrive, and People technologies are experiencing problems, making it difficult for some people to access the cloud services.

The issues began on Wednesday morning and affected Microsoft’s hosted storage, email and contact services. Its Azure cloud coincidentally reported problems for SQL databases in the North Central US data center region.

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In typical Redmond fashion, information on the nature of the faults was scant, with Redmond saying “services such as Hotmail, Messenger, and SkyDrive are experiencing technical difficulties. We appreciate your patient as work on the problem.”

The AP report says that:

Microsoft is trying to fix a technological breakdown that has cut off some people from their email accounts on Outlook.com and files stored on the company’s SkyDrive service.

The NSA must be upset as it cannot access customers’ data for a while, spying on them with Microsoft’s help. The NSA is right now pressuring to pass new laws that will let it spy even more, under the premise that it would help fight DDOS attacks. Conveniently enough, the rival of the government propaganda site, theCIA Outpost/Bezos Post , has apparently been under DDOS attacks or got cracked:

The Web site for the New York Times continued to have problems Wednesday after an hours-long outage.

The site became inaccessible in the late morning. It came back up about 1:30 p.m., but stories did not appear to have been updated. It is unclear what was the cause of the problem, which also affected the company’s corporate site and its mobile-device apps.

Wait for the NSA to use that as an excuse to justify its spying, just like those closures of consulates in numerous countries (a lot of consulates are secretly used for foreign surveillance and espionage, reveal leaks).

Aside from all this, Microsoft has been openwashing its ‘cloud’ efforts as of late, not without help from old friends. GigaOM, which was previously paid by Microsoft to embed fake content (ads) in articles, doing some PR for Microsoft, seeding yet more such coverage. Placements for agenda masquerading as articles? What do they think they are, the New York Times?

[Source]