Microsoft Throttles Some Office 365 Services To Continue To Meet Demand (zdnet.com) 43
In response to high demand as a result of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, Microsoft has started taking action to preserve overall performance by throttling some services. ZDNet reports: On March 16, Microsoft posted to Microsoft 365/Office 365 admin dashboardds a warning about "temporary feature adjustments" that it might take. That warning told customers that Microsoft was "making temporary adjustments to select non-essential capabilities." Officials said they did not expect these changes to have significan impact on users' experiences. Among the examples of the types of changes Microsoft might take would be things like how often its services check for presence; intervals in which other parties typing are displayed; and video resolution. Today, March 24, Microsoft started cautioning Microsoft 365/Office 365 commercial users of some other "temporary changes" they should expect. The list:
OneNote:
- OneNote in Teams will be read-only for commercial tenants, excluding EDU. Users can go to OneNote for the web for editing.
- Download size and sync frequency of file attachments has been changed.
- You can find details on these and other OneNote related updates at http://aka.ms/notesupdates.
SharePoint:
- We are rescheduling specific backend operations to regional evening and weekend business hours. Impacted capabilities include migration, DLP and delays in file management after uploading a new file, video or image.
- Reduced video resolution for playback videos
Stream:
- People timeline has been disabled for newly uploaded videos. Pre-existing videos will not be impacted.
OneNote:
- OneNote in Teams will be read-only for commercial tenants, excluding EDU. Users can go to OneNote for the web for editing.
- Download size and sync frequency of file attachments has been changed.
- You can find details on these and other OneNote related updates at http://aka.ms/notesupdates.
SharePoint:
- We are rescheduling specific backend operations to regional evening and weekend business hours. Impacted capabilities include migration, DLP and delays in file management after uploading a new file, video or image.
- Reduced video resolution for playback videos
Stream:
- People timeline has been disabled for newly uploaded videos. Pre-existing videos will not be impacted.
Video sucked (Score:3)
Tried to use desktop sharing yesterday for a remote consulting and it was impossible to read any putty windows. So we switched back to Skype and that worked great.
Re:Video sucked (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Video sucked (Score:4, Interesting)
As funny as that is I've experienced the same. Skype for Business is struggling with basic function. MS Teams is running fine. I mean this is probably MS purposefully screwing with Skype to drive more Teams adoption but the reality is what it is. It's not the company but rather the specific product that is currently suffering.
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As funny as that is I've experienced the same. Skype for Business is struggling with basic function. MS Teams is running fine. I mean this is probably MS purposefully screwing with Skype to drive more Teams adoption but the reality is what it is. It's not the company but rather the specific product that is currently suffering.
Same. Teams works pretty well for us. I really don't understand the complaining about it. It's been stable and functional, and we use it far more than we used Skype Business.
Re:Video sucked (Score:4, Informative)
Nope. Getting the task done and solving the problem made me happy. That was the focus.
Re:Video sucked (Score:4, Interesting)
Warned about this 2 weeks ago (Score:5, Interesting)
The Cloud is great for burst capacity. When everybody needs burst capacity, the cloud has basically the same problem as your own datacenter, you either pay a ton for reserved capacity just in case you need it or you roll with outages and reduce functionality.
Zoom, WebEx, Office365, AWS, Box, Dropbox, Workday, Slack etc have all been dealing with outages and shortages over the last 2 days because literally everyone is offsite.
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Zoom, WebEx, Office365, AWS, Box, Dropbox, Workday, Slack etc have all been dealing with outages and shortages over the last 2 days because literally everyone is offsite.
OK, normally I'd ignore this misuse of the word literally, because really, nobody loves a grammar Nazi. But how could you miss the chance to say "virtually everyone is offsite"?
What is a "commercial tenant"? (Score:2)
A distributed note system that is read-only sounds like it is pretty gimped, what kind of customer is a "commercial tenant"?
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The people paying for the more expensive plans ($25/user/month). The cheaper versions are considered home and small business plans.
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A distributed note system that is read-only sounds like it is pretty gimped
It's not read only. Access through the Teams interface is read only, but the direct web interface (and thick/mobile clients) is not.
Ouch (Score:2)
I have to use this at work via Linux (my workstation). At least I think it is Office 365, it is an on line version of Excel that windows people use as a project checklist. As an IT person, I have little need for Office.
It is already slow as XXXX, cannot image it being any slower. I guess now - I move the cursor, play nethack a bit, move the cursor, back to nethack. Rinse/Reoeap
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Now go sit in a corner and shame yourself about that dumb comment
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Are you aware that LibreOffice garbles most MS documents into a pile of emojibake and misformatted text.
Sure LibreOffice might work for your Junior year book report, but when we need to have documents render correctly, you just use the damn tools that everyone else uses. Why? Because its goddamn easier. I'm not willing to throw myself over a fire over a word processor. I have bigger issues to deal with than choice of word processor.
Grow up.
No wonder I couldnâ(TM)t use OneDrive today. (Score:3, Interesting)
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Needed to share a 8 gb file, but first, had to copy it from one folder to another in OneDrive and it always got stuck at 50%.
After waiting for over one hour, i uploaded a local copy to Google Drive and was done in less than 20 minures.
Because of a story that doesn't mention or affect OneDrive? Is that the reason? I guess Office365 throttling is also the reason for the toilet paper shortage by your logic. OneDrive appears to work just fine, both for small and large files.
In some of the UK AZURE is out of resources (Score:4, Informative)
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Businesses who think they are important need to keep a card/storage up their sleeves, because the salespitch has failed..
Yes and no. The Sales pitch was to scale with business requirements, not global pandemic requirements. Datacentres around the world are resource constrained at present, but critically they are still running. Comparatively a lot of businesses who've kept everything in house are finding that their systems are still running ... because they can't even be accessed by employees who have melted the corporate VPN endpoints into a small puddle.
A slow cloud is far better than what some businesses who used to treat r
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They had at least 3-4 weeks notice and the problem is that cloud did promise disaster recovery resources or even to be able to run your whole business on their system.
The problem is that it can't run everybody's business on their system because the practice of overselling the stuff they actually have. It's similar to broadband, yes they promise you 100Mbps or 1Gbps, but if everyone is using it, the oversell is something like 100:1. Same for cloud, it's a money maker as long as you can oversell 100:1 the cap
This is why ... (Score:3)
This is why using someone else's computer (aka The Cloud) is such a bad idea. If they shut down completely and kept all the money there is probably nothing the victims could do about it. So y'all made your bed, now go sleep in it and stop bothering me that you were so bloody stupid. I have nothing to say except "Gee, I told you so, now fuck off".
Re:This is why ... (Score:5, Informative)
Indeed. Because people who ran their own servers are happily coping with a fundamental change in their IT infrastructure. /Sarcasm
Seriously if you look to the companies which did migrate to "someone else's frigging huge data centre" they are the ones coping the best. Companies which have kept things in house are frigging crumbling right now. Skype servers down due to being unable to serve video. VPNs down due to being unable to scale.
Gee you told me so that my aromatically stored and shared streaming video is reduced in quality, that replication and back end activities may get scheduled nightly? What will I do! Go to sleep, in the bed I made, and I'll sleep comfortably.
It's amazing that the demonstrated successes of cloud services scaling more than anyone ever imagined they would still brings out people who think they would be able to handle the situation better in on their own underfunded aging in house garbage infrastructure.
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I expect there needs to be a happy medium here.
There are a lot of Cloud services that should be run locally, the average PC today has tons of idle CPU Time that could be used. As well most internal networks are 100 mbs on the slow end, and most are 1gbs which still offers a lot of internal bandwidth, that can be utilized.
I personally would like to see many of the cloud services to have a local option to purchase and install for the organizations that can deal with them, or use the cloud services for the sm
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There are a lot of Cloud services that should be run locally, the average PC today has tons of idle CPU Time that could be used.
The average PC's CPU is not able to handle or distribute tasks on a corporate network they way a cloud service can. ... especially considering it's busy running all the other garbage IT install on PCs and scanning for malware every 5 minutes. Also looking at the numbers at the back of your network port is not relevant. The numbers which matter is the I/O throughput on the device and above all the core network switch's capacity. Most corporate networks I know barely have the capacity to run day to day operat
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The problem is the same in cloud service land, yes, right now, day 3 of everybody figuring out how to work from home, it still kind of works, but all cloud services are experiencing delays and problems with scaling.
It's the same problem in your own datacenter, the primary problem I've seen is not in capacity but in licensed capacity. So people are complaining their VPN or teleconference doesn't work because Cisco sold them an appliance that could under all circumstances host a few thousand connections, but
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Seriously if you look to the companies which did migrate to "someone else's frigging huge data centre" they are the ones coping the best. Companies which have kept things in house are frigging crumbling right now.
Is there anything you can cite that's actually tracking things like this? Just wondering if you're making a statement based on data or... nothing. Anecdotally, the small business I left last year has to stay open right now as they're a medical manufacturer, they're having no problems with their underfunded aging in-house infrastructure. Meanwhile, a friend of mine works for a much larger company where he's having a hard time getting half as much work done in a day as their "cloud-based" infrastructure (I do
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The money-grabbing subscription failed? (Score:2)
Good! I hope it crashes and dies in a ditch and people switch to LibreOffice.
Will be seen as a Good Thing!! (Score:2)
The problem here is that a lot of the know-nothing PHBs that spend their time on golf courses will see this as a good thing. In their minds they'll make up weird stuff like "I don't hear Amazon or Google doing anything like this with their cloud products - we should accelerate our use of Azure in the next quarter!"
The fact that Microsoft can't run a bath, much less run a cloud service won't be a concern :-(
Throttling is not meeting demand (Score:2)
If you have to throttle your services, then by definition you are not meeting demand, but falling behind. This is a consequence of Microsoft's design mentality: efficiency, responsiveness, and network bandwidth/latency are the user's problem, not the software engineer's.
Why can't people understand that network latency is a productivity killer? Yes, it may technically "work" from the cloud, but the amount of time it takes to do so will impact the bottom line in lost productivity. Those of us who use UN
Telemetry (Score:1)
How about turning off telemetry? This will reduce the load by...loads!