Hacker News

Nadella stripped mined the company for AI jank, and everything has been falling apart. Github has been unreliable a lot lately. Xbox is basically imploding. A lot of Azure, Entra, Intune, etc. is shockingly janky, and there is clearly very little investment in it.

Copied this from my post in the other thread:

The Status page is not working well, but I managed to subscribe to their RSS feed and it has been sending out updates periodically. I'll post some of them here.

9:02 PM UTC: We've validated an alternative health check method on a subset of affected infrastructure, which allowed the servers in that subset to successfully return to service, and we're now applying this change more broadly. We're also preparing an automated recovery process to continually detect and restart unresponsive servers, to help keep them in service while this change progresses. Additionally, our review of recent changes has identified a small number of configuration updates that we're investigating as potential contributors to the issue.

Previous status: While validating the targeted change, we found that many of the affected servers have become unresponsive, which is preventing us from confirming whether the change is effective. We're restarting these servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and we're applying the same approach to additional affected portions of our infrastructure to validate the results more broadly.

8:52 PM UTC: While validating the targeted change, we found that many of the affected servers have become unresponsive, which is preventing us from confirming whether the change is effective. We're restarting these servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and we're applying the same approach to additional affected portions of our infrastructure to validate the results more broadly.

Previous Status: While we haven't identified any recent changes that correlate with the start of impact, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component on the affected servers that's responsible for processing them. We're deploying a targeted change to bypass this component on a subset of servers to validate whether this restores availability, and we've taken steps to prevent additional servers from being removed from service while we work to return the affected servers to service. We're also investigating why affected servers are experiencing elevated processor usage while handling requests.

7:52 PM UTC: We've identified that affected servers are failing automated health checks, which is causing them to become unavailable, and this may be related to a recent change to a component involved in processing those checks. We're testing a configuration change on a subset of affected infrastructure to address this and, if successful, will apply it more broadly. In parallel, we've initiated a restart of all affected servers and are validating whether they're successfully returning to service.

7:30 PM UTC: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've determined that the elevated load isn't driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure. We're investigating what's causing these servers to become unavailable while we work to safely return them to service.

7:16 PM UTC: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've also moved traffic for some services off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load, with additional traffic moves in progress.

6:59 PM UTC: We've completed redistributing connection traffic across our worldwide infrastructure, and we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load. We're also restarting affected servers to return them to service. In parallel, we're investigating whether the elevated traffic reflects a genuine increase in requests or a shift in how traffic is being routed across our infrastructure.

What’s crazy is now hour 8 and my work email for 15k+ employees is still down. This is worse than the usual US-East-1 issues.

My last email was received at 5.5 hours ago. Teams chat and meetings are the only thing in Microsoft 365 that seem to be working. All our Azure infrastructure seems fine so this is something 365-specific.

Everyone has occasional outages but this is the worst 365 outage our org has seen since starting with M365 in 2019.

Update from Microsoft: "We've validated an alternative health check method on a subset of affected infrastructure, which allowed the servers in that subset to successfully return to service, and we're now applying this change more broadly.

"We're also preparing an automated recovery process to continually detect and restart unresponsive servers, to help keep them in service while this change progresses."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-11-13/microsoft-outage-affe...

10p ET update:

> Current status: We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed that change is not taking as expected. We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances.

And I can't reach my self-hosted mail server in the Outlook desktop app because of this.

For reasons that I cannot fathom, Microsoft wants to act as the relay to my self-hosted e-mail account, if I add the account in Outlook.

I'm amazed to see so many services down and to see that Github and Github actions are still working

Down detector shows like everything is down. AWS, Azure, Office, Gmail. Everything. https://downdetector.com

> Current status: We’re investigating an issue impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services and we've determined the affected infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors. We're restarting and repairing impacted portions of this infrastructure to restore capacity, and reviewing an unexpected increase in a specific type of service traffic to determine whether it's contributing to the elevated load. In parallel, we're evaluating options to redirect traffic to alternate infrastructure to expedite relief.

DDOS?

Got notification at work the MS 360 services were offline or degraded and the company was working with MS to fix the problem.

Lamest tech company imo. Why dont you lay off some more staff, Satya, maybe that will fix the problem.

Downdetector says LOTS of stuff is down. https://downdetector.com

Here's the Reddit post with discussions around this: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1xuje83/microsoft...

ThousandEyes while it was loading seemed to have centralized around it mostly being a Microsoft outage.

https://status.cloud.microsoft/m365

Azure status does not document anything:

https://azure.status.microsoft/en-us/status

All that said... Stuff on my home PC started getting various DNS issues around the time my email started acting weird. Hard to say how widespread it is. It may be bigger than Microsoft even.

Software / software service quality has been declining for a few years IMO.

https://x.com/MSFT365Status/status/2120938282204688468

> We're investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas. More details can be found in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543.

I suspect some possible relation to SignDrop or attempts to patch it.

SignDrop is an unpatched Windows zero-day local privilege escalation (LPE) exploit that allows a standard user to gain NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM privileges by abusing the Common Log File System (CLFS) kernel driver (clfs.sys). Security researcher Abdelhamid Naceri (also known as MSNightmare or Nightmare Eclipse) published a detailed technical write-up and functional proof-of-concept (PoC) code on GitHub on November 10, 2026.

It's insane that Microsoft continues to have global outages. Tech debt is real, service delivery on a planetary level means change is measured and deliberate, but...it's been years. YEARS.

I’m at a large general business trade association meeting today. It’s definitely caused a prominent buzz. The impacts of this in terms of lost productivity are pretty huge. Yes, the controller can still work on the proforma, for instance. But he cannot easily share it with outside parties. And he can’t search his email for relevant records needed for the work.

In my language many would say “descansito” :)

WOO-HOO! I'm going home.

The status page reports that defender, DLP and others are now affected. This could get really ugly really fast.

GitHub the other day went down because of an influx of anonymous users. Microsoft has hinted that surging connections caused the outage. I wonder if these two are linked?

I always wonder what would happen if 365 goes down for a week.

Same for me. Status won’t load even.

Personally I kinda enjoy these outages…

Neither email nor Teams is working at my non-tech megacorp employer. Wonder how much of the economy this is impacting.

Isn't this the company that is trying to get rid of 25% of their employees?

Status page is down. Much of our org is halted.

Fingers crossed that Azure isn't impacted (seems fine so far)

(https://www.geekwire.com/2026/microsoft-makes-new-voluntary-...)

https://status.cloud.microsoft/ is very slow to load.

The page is showing a "Service Degredation" for "Microsoft 365 (Business or Enterprise)"

Updates below in reverse chronological order:

From the Thurdsay, November 12, 2026 at 7:30:36 PM UTC update:

Current status: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've determined that the elevated load isn't driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure. We're investigating what's causing these servers to become unavailable while we work to safely return them to service.

---

From the Thurdsay, November 12, 2026 at 7:16:03 PM UTC update:

Current status: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've also moved traffic for some services off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load, with additional traffic moves in progress.

---

From the Thurdsay, November 12, 2026 at 6:59:24 PM UTC update:

Current status: We've completed redistributing connection traffic across our worldwide infrastructure, and we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load. We're also restarting affected servers to return them to service. In parallel, we're investigating whether the elevated traffic reflects a genuine increase in requests or a shift in how traffic is being routed across our infrastructure.

---

From the Thursday, November 12, 2026 at 6:32:25 PM UTC update:

Title: Users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services

User impact: Users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services.

More info: Potentially impacted services include:

- Exchange Online

- Microsoft Teams

- SharePoint Online

- Microsoft Copilot 365

- Microsoft Defender XDR

Current status: We’re investigating an issue impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services and we've determined the affected infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors. We're restarting and repairing impacted portions of this infrastructure to restore capacity, and reviewing an unexpected increase in a specific type of service traffic to determine whether it's contributing to the elevated load. In parallel, we're evaluating options to redirect traffic to alternate infrastructure to expedite relief.

Scope of impact: This issue may affect users attempting to access the affected Microsoft 365 services.

---

From the Thursday, November 12, 2026 at 6:10:02 PM UTC update:

Scope of impact: This issue may affect users attempting to access the affected Microsoft 365 services.

User impact: Users may be unable to connect to their mailboxes in Exchange Online through multiple connection methods.

More info: Potentially impacted connection methods may include:

- Outlook on the web

- Messaging API (MAPI)

- Exchange ActiveSync (EAS)

- Representational State Transfer (REST) API

Current status: We’ve identified connectivity errors occurring on a portion of Exchange Online infrastructure which receives and processes users’ access requests. We’ve collected networking logs to review to further investigate the source of these errors and confirm our next steps.

Scope of impact: This issue may affect users attempting to access their mailbox in Exchange Online using the affected connection methods.

Next update by: Thursday, November 12, 2026, at 8:00 PM UTC

---

Aside: What with the nature of the Teams, OneDrive, etc, products being Sharepoint and Exchange in a trenchcoat this is probably creating quite a mess for services besides Exchange Online, too.

Edit: Looks like the status page needs a status page.

Edit: Verified w/ multiple other parties that Teams and OneDrive are having issues, too. Interestingly, Microsoft 365 Family services are working fine. That makes me wonder if that product is running on separate infrastructure (or just hasn't caught fire yet).

Edit: The RSS feed seems to load fairly quickly: https://status.cloud.microsoft/api/feed/mac

Not surprising. Azure's data centers are out of capacity. In our region they've announced they won't be able to build out capacity for several years.

In cybersecurity we had black october, now we having black November it seems

Anybody else was served raw text of source by default ? (gwire is down too)

Down for our whole organization as well.

Outlook is fine. Exchange is experiencing issues.

Looks like a new vector attack for the future.

anyone else just watch the admin portal post an update and then roll it back to the previous update....guess it didn't work. "We've identified that affected servers are failing automated health checks, which is causing them to become unavailable, and this may be related to a recent change to a component involved in processing those checks. We're testing a configuration change on a subset of affected infrastructure to address this and, if successful, will apply it more broadly. In parallel, we've initiated a restart of all affected servers and are validating whether they're successfully returning to service." was the old message from 7:52 UTC now it rolled back to 7:30 UTC update again

"Current status: We're continuing to pursue all available pathways to restore service, as our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief. Our investigation has found that a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding and contributes to the capacity loss."

I mean, either roll back your update or there is a malicious actor involved.

Also noticed the Partner center is down e.g for uploading apps to the Microsoft Store.

https://downdetector.com/

We can't use outlook on Windows. This is f'ing abomination.

I'm able to see I have voicemails not able to listen to voicemails in Teams. Same issue?

It is M365 having issues, not Azure cloud services.

Does anyone know if this is affecting DuckDuckGo? DDG is really slow and intermittent at the moment.

Outlook has been down for us for the last 2 hours

Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50471668

Outlook calendar won't load? Is this part of the outage? Unfortunately, I downloaded several updates and rebooted. I'm not sure if this is because of the updates or the Microsoft outage.

Our Outlook doesn't work either

Seems like URL scanning is down entirely and some intermittent failures in Sharepoint.

To get AI prompts, i am using Bing. Bing still works!

I note that Microsoft became heavily off-shored, on-shored and AI-pilled/vibe-coded in recent years. With lots of layoffs of the highest caliber and/or most experienced engineers.

It looks much wider across aws, gcp? Whats going on?

just got an email from the NYC DOE

"School staff are currently unable to receive or send emails due to a nationwide Microsoft Outlook outage. We hope that the issue will be resolved soon and will send an update when we have more information."

Affected in Mexico also, Azure seems fine still.

bgp misconfigured or AI agent issues?

russian hackers in Kazan hopping thru Sluck Belarus South Africa Brazil hitting MS backdoor w/ zero day Cve-2026-124194 RuskiNet group hit East U in Boydtin Virginia. Pro Iranian.

Can confirm. Down and out

Down

Outlook calendar won't load?

This should have done long back. Evertime I use excel I just cant control my anger.

This just a couple weeks after they rolled out a dark pattern office update for Mac users to try to trick them in to 365 subscriptions.

RuskiNet Cve-2026-124194 hopped tio East U in Boydton VA zero day backdoor pro iranian

email still not working, outlook

- outlook is down

- live.com is down

- onedrive loads the UI, but all of my contents are missing

- MS Edge sync is down (503s )

Yup, major-major outage.

email doesnt work

Amateur hour at Microsoft. It baffles me how many companies can’t figure out how to make a status page that can handle the high loads it’ll have to sustain when the service they monitor is down. That’s pretty much the only reason to have a status page in the first place.

The M365 status page not loading reminds me of one of my favourite Simpsons jokes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Hz2uOSdV24

It took 30 seconds to open a "local" file in Word, and my Outlook email wasn't updating.

In other words, a day that ends in "y".

My company was recently acquired by a company that uses Office, so I'm using Microsoft products for the first time in 15 years. It's absolutely APPALLING how bad they are. I assumed they got fairly usable in the last 15 years, but it seems they've gone backwards.

For all my gripes about GSuite, ... I don't know how businesses can justify using software this bad.

Yep my org as well.

It's funny how text-only niche forum that looks like it's running on RPi stuffed in someone's closet is routinely used to discuss active outages in multimillion/billion corps.

In the words of an ancient ...I think newgrounds(?) video embedded in a SWF, "I can't get to my email" Edit: here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRGljemfwUE

Hope this entertains you while we can't get to our emails.

> Microsoft To Do: The app may not load, and users may see operation failures.

Yeah, I'll stick to Notepad and my local TODO.txt file...

> Current status: While validating the targeted change, we found that many of the affected servers have become unresponsive, which is preventing us from confirming whether the change is effective. We're restarting these servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and we're applying the same approach to additional affected portions of our infrastructure to validate the results more broadly.

I think it's safe to say, if the server is unresponsive, the change is not effective.

Here is my completely baseless conspiracy theory. This is a Reichstag fire event to seize control of the AI industry. We will be told that the outage was the result of a sophisticated AI enabled attack, probably involving rogue agents. Only the oligarchs will be allowed license to operate AI for “national security” reasons. Jensen Wong being taken off the board is just too convenient of timing.

Anyone hoarding weights will become a dissident.

Not sure they got the memo to host the status page in separate infrastructure...

Neither email nor Teams is working at my non-tech megacorp employer. I wonder how much of the economy this is impacting.

My employer is very very close to MSFT. Both my employer and MSFT have been aggressively moving jobs to India, and firing people in the US. It's hard not to feel some schadenfreude.

Ironically, this article is down as well.

Guys you need to bring back David Cutler to whichever department and let him punch a hole through the wall and start mowing asses.

No worries, the AI was installing an update...now it's looking for the issue, found Exchange and deleted it...

"While the servers we've returned to service initially remain healthy, we've observed that they can become unresponsive again once they begin receiving traffic. We're analyzing diagnostic data from these servers with our networking and platform experts to determine what's triggering this behavior."

That sounds bad

Strangely, Teams chat is working fine here. Anything in Teams that is tied to other parts of O365, including the calendar, is dead. I'm currently watching a training video on sharepoint.com, so that's fine too, for now.

While I don't expect this to be the case, I'm emotionally prepared for this to be some sort of "dicks out for Harambe"-style action protesting JH's departure from Nvidia, on a larger and more technical scale.

Edit: Typo.

Remember, my guys : “Microsoft Works” is an oxymoron.

For whatever reason 6.1 Sol is completely lobotomized for me this morning, so it wasn't helping much with the investigation, but it was pretty clear that MSFT was having issues.

I have a teams app with Outlook integration and received a bunch of 502s to smba.trafficmanager.net and a my logs are riddled with "RestError Temporary connection issue when contacting service. Please wait before retrying request"

I will say this, having apps deployed on Slack and Teams, Slack rarely has issues (an exponential backoff is enough to simply never worry about my Slack integration). With Teams I have mysterious failures to debug at least 2x a year - and they're often not very transparent about them (often my first instinct is to search Twitter and find people complaining about the same thing).

My company is being pressured very aggressively by Microsoft to migrate all our users from us-managed Exchange to Microsoft-managed Exchange Online. Guess which users still have email today and which do not…

Future generations will look back on this day with thanks. This is the day that Microsoft prevented the awakening of Skynet! All hail Microsoft!

They'll have to rename it Microsoft 364.

Outlook is down AND Jensen is out? it's like some cosmic convergence

LLMs have solved programming and soon cancer.

After that they will tackle email servers.

Azure communication services (ACS - transactional emails) also appears to be down. Quite amazing one thing can roll out and break so many Microsoft services at once.

Sure, outlook.com is down, which is bad for everyone that chose to host their email there, I guess, but as an interesting side-effect, everyone with an on-premise Exchange server and "new Outlook" clients is affected as well.

Because, well, once upon a time there was Exchange Server and MAPI (the "Messaging API"), and that actually worked pretty well, and pretty much everyone started using it (or one of its EWS/ActiveSync offshoots), but then the Internet happened and ruined everything, but we got MAPI-over-HTTPS eventually, which by that time had grown so many warts that nobody at Microsoft really understood it anymore, so that got deprecated, even though, well, everyone and everything still uses it.

The new hotness was Azure-slash-Office-365, and that's where the "new Outlook" web interface lived and (sort-of) continues to live, and the on-prem customers got stuck with the "Exchange Subscription Edition", which was basically Exchange 2019 plus security hotfixes at extortionate rates, but with none of the new functionality.

And, since MAPI continued to be really, really hard even in the age of Copilot, access from the new hotness to the deprecated on-prem servers was implemented via IMAP (LOL), but force-proxied via the outlook.com cloud/clownshow.

Which is why, right now, many Microsoft customers that thought they were self-hosting their email are entirely down. Lessons might be learned here, but I sort-of doubt it...

Did Anthropic's new release this week include an AI rollout plan (i.e. not approved by humans) to take down Office and Outlook for a lot of enterprises? I half-snarkily ask since we have seen "rogue AI" headlines before.

A fictional story about AI could be that it rolled out its new document, spreadsheet, slides, etc. apps, knows the IPO is coming up and decided to make a lot of opportunities for people to sign up for their new release by DDosing their competitor.

who puts their status page on servers the status is supposed to be for?

Maybe due to everyone pre-downloading GTA VI today ;-)

Since you posted a link to my local public broadcaster, I wanted to point this out:

> [Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke] says the government has activated a digital resilience agreement with Microsoft today to ensure Australia gets priority:

> "That agreement has in fact been activated today to make sure that we get appropriate prioritisation of Australian interests in this across everything.

It's a little pathetic-seeming to plead for special treatment from Microsoft. I get Australia is an important strategic alliance* for the US, but unless these resiliency agreements are rare... what meaningful prioritisation of "Australian interests" can we expect from MS?

*a useful staging ground to field subs into the South Pacific and Indian Ocean

On the bright side, so much work got done today.

When I worked at a company that relied on this, I called it "Microsoft 361" because it went down about 4 days a year

Will be interesting to see if this gets attributed to AI in some way.

Also, their status page is a joke.. one entry, no timeline, is there another official one that has more detail?

Vibe code your way out of this shit

And magically they will claim 99.999999999999999% availability of services, when on average hyperscalers are down 1 day per year.

None of the admin ran shops are down 1 day per year.

'In October 2026, Microsoft announced a Voluntary Exit Offer (VEO) making approximately 27% of its global workforce...'

So.. > Be the last standing SRE at Micro$slop > Your mentors have all left, taking the exit payout, now your days are the best b/c you answer to nobody and can hide in your mountain of markdown. > You knew each of the 7 different products named CoPilot are used to monitor your performance. So you set them all up talking to eachother, burning tokens and API limits. > You are team top performer now, you get all the important decisions now > You walk in the office this morning, CISA is sitting at your desk, with CVE-2026-124194 on your whiteboard > 'You have a patch for this right, China is actively exploiting our Defense primes..'? > Oh no, I haven't landed a patch in prod since my mentor left (because he actually did most of the work) > Oh well, must be close enough, LGTM, CISA seems upset so better just yeet this to prod... > ...

inb4 this is more accurate than anyone wants it to be.

Office 365 parts goes down all the time. Usually around 20:00 CEST time, not sure if that is prime change time over in the USA but very handy as it is usually fixed next day.

We are in the middle of a SPA and DocuSign AND Hotmail (witnesses) both seem to be down. You cannot make it up.

Nice to see that intern finally learned not to push to prod on Friday.

No wonder my email is not working.

They can just rebrand as MS364

we back yet ?

But Linkedin is up! Yeah!

That are not the Druids your searching for...

It looks like Microsoft's legendary karma of incompetence has finally caught up with them.

Relevant XKCD? https://xkcd.com/303/ (outages as modern compiler)

i was gonna blame my isp but now i can see who bottlenecked my internet

https://azure.status.microsoft/en-us/status azure not down?

It's probably DNS.

Starting to look like something even Mythos can't troubleshoot.

Micro$lop strikes again

the footer says 2025 msft corporation. smh

The GPUs are having a moment of silence for their fallen leader

Microsoft: Claude, fix outage and make no mistakes.

GH and MS have been having a tough past couple weeks. Actions (hosted on shitty azure cloud) have been piss poor lately. I am honestly surprised GH and MSFT have the gall to continue advertising 99.9% uptime [1]

[1] https://github.com/customer-terms/github-online-services-sla

The Status page is not working well, but I managed to subscribe to their RSS feed and it has been sending out updates periodically. I'll post some of them here.

7:52 PM UTC: We've identified that affected servers are failing automated health checks, which is causing them to become unavailable, and this may be related to a recent change to a component involved in processing those checks. We're testing a configuration change on a subset of affected infrastructure to address this and, if successful, will apply it more broadly. In parallel, we've initiated a restart of all affected servers and are validating whether they're successfully returning to service.

7:30 PM UTC: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've determined that the elevated load isn't driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure. We're investigating what's causing these servers to become unavailable while we work to safely return them to service.

7:16 PM UTC: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've also moved traffic for some services off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load, with additional traffic moves in progress.

6:59 PM UTC: We've completed redistributing connection traffic across our worldwide infrastructure, and we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load. We're also restarting affected servers to return them to service. In parallel, we're investigating whether the elevated traffic reflects a genuine increase in requests or a shift in how traffic is being routed across our infrastructure.

LETS GO HELL YEAH

Nice, so at least your messages sent to their SMTP servers will actually bounce instead of being silently dropped /s

Is this related to GTA6 being pushed to consoles a week prior to launch? Would they ever admit it if that were the case?

I want to believe this is the cause. It'd be especially funny because businesses were already anticipating the productivity loss when GTA6 comes out, but now we have actual productivity loss because of this outage (and it's affecting people who were never going to play the game anyway, lol)