You've Got Mail. Hopefully.
Microsoft is staffing the AI buildings. The crew that runs email is aging out.
Outlook went down Thursday and took a good chunk of the working world's inbox with it. Microsoft says a pile of its own servers dropped offline and buried the ones left standing. No one yet knows why so much broke (or isn't telling), but we know who was on shift.
It's the behind-the-scenes, not-very-glamorous infra crew.
Let's see what else we can find in the data.
A couple things jump out. Microsoft's datacenter ranks have more than doubled since the start of 2022. Dollars to donuts this is about AI and has nothing to do with a newfound interest in email platform stability. The company told Wall Street two weeks ago that capital spending will run about $170 billion this calendar year, and nary a word about email infra.
What about the people who answer the pager? Over the same stretch the site reliability and service engineers, the ones whose lives got a helluva lot more complicated starting yesterday, are down by a quarter. And the engineers building M365 and related platforms are down 40 percent, with most of that drop coming in the last two years.
There's one more odd thing about the email infra crew: they're lifers! More than half have 10+ years at Microsoft, compared to fewer than one in four for the rest of the engineering staff. Either they're really, really dedicated to Mr. Softie or the M365/Exchange skills aren't that transferable.
Did the staffing cause the outage? No idea. A thin bench doesn't really take down a server, but it can determine how long it stays down.
Regardless, if any of the email infra lifers opt to take MSFT up on its voluntary exit offer, my hunch is they will likely be encouraged/incented to stick around!
Dig into the Microsoft genome here.