This is wrong on so many levels. First of all, IT admins receive weekly e-mails from AWS, Google and MS that a certain service will shut down and that it will affect operations. In 90% of the cases, these e-mails are sent to all customers instead of only the affected customers, so admins get alarm fatigue.
Secondly, instead of doing a rug pull, what's wrong with a 2-month brownout period? Only allow the admin to login, put OneDrive in read-only mode. That will alert all users clearly.
Thirdly instead of fending of the questions from slate.com with Orwellian corporate speak, they should acknowledge their mistake and spend a couple of weeks of the highly paid engineers to see whether they can recover the data. Why is it always so hard for MS to say "Sorry, we made a mistake".
KronisLV 13 hours ago [-]
> Why is it always so hard for MS to say "Sorry, we made a mistake".
Seems like no corpos ever want to say that. Surely it’s not because of some pride or PR? I’m guessing such an admission might also sometimes have legal risks?
prymitive 11 hours ago [-]
Saying sorry means admitting guilt.
If there’s guilt there some level of harm.
If there’s harm you can be sued.
Avoiding being sued due to causing harm usually means increased costs, because you now need to take care you didn’t take before.
Higher cost means you’re less competitive.
Being less competitive makes you less attractive investment target.
So as always it’s all about money.
Saying sorry == lower share price.
conception 6 hours ago [-]
The worst thing you can be in America is wrong. Our entire public society is built around, not admitting guilt or wrongdoing in any way shape or form.
12_throw_away 1 days ago [-]
Yep, this is the sort of thing happens when you've deeply internalized that trustworthiness and continuity is not important. Microsoft today is not a serious company, it is not run by serious people, and it is at the forefront of a deeply unserious industry.
lenkite 12 hours ago [-]
Even most non-serious companies generally tend to follow their own statements regarding product license duration which is a very fundamental thing.
"He renewed Canopy’s yearly license last October, and Microsoft had emailed him to confirm he would retain access until Oct. 4, 2026"
Someone decided to pull the plug anyways.
petcat 23 hours ago [-]
What does "serious" mean in this context?
robomc 22 hours ago [-]
In this context it would presumably mean not casually deleting your customers' data.
When people say a company is unserious they almost always mean that they're not thinking about, and taking seriously, the work that their customers do. This seems like a classic example of that.
itsamario 21 hours ago [-]
Unprofessional or irresponsible are more applicable.
Some define a standard others set it. This came up when my employer was applying for business continuity insurance
rolandog 17 hours ago [-]
Hopefully they form a class action lawsuit and get the label "criminally negligent"; allegedly.
brookst 19 hours ago [-]
Not the person you’re responding to, but I’d say serious here means committed to delivering value for customers, willing to take lower profits in the short term to be steadfast and reliable, deeply introspective about process (with transparent communication).
Just, you know, taking business seriously. Like they did even 6 or 8 years ago.
The core business now is execs ego-stroking each other and hoping disaster strikes after they cash out.
When Satya came in there was a dramatic shift in culture, and things were improving. I won’t argue they were super-serious, but at least getting better, and focusing on the business rather than the internal strife that Balmer loved to much.
But now… just the opposite. This IS a deeply unserious business. The tech bros got the keys to the combine and have no idea WTF to do, so it’s all cosplay.
eithed 22 hours ago [-]
Dependable.
16 hours ago [-]
Grimblewald 21 hours ago [-]
producing an os with a focus on utility to end user would be a start. Even just something that makes some form of effort to give users a return on investment on their hardware. Right now, you unluck massive headroom, battery life, and stability, on a laptop by simple putting linux on it. All that despite windows enjoying better all around driver support from manufacturers.
A serious company would never have allowed its core product to turn into the clown show it currently is, yet here we are, a massive corporation pushes an OS that feels vibe coded, and is largly propped up by what little residual community goodwill/ignorance exsists.
pschastain 19 hours ago [-]
MS's core product is and always has been Office, specifically Excel. Windows is simply the delivery method
inigyou 8 hours ago [-]
Microsoft doesn't sell any product called Office.
fwipsy 18 hours ago [-]
What about Azure? Looks like it takes more revenue than Windows and Office put together.
geocar 15 hours ago [-]
Does it now.
Azure's cost of revenue is someplace between 14% (Productivity and Business Processes) and 36% (Intelligent Cloud). Software is 1%.
Looks to me like Software pays for the whole thing.
inigyou 8 hours ago [-]
You can't know that based on only cost of revenue percentage.
geocar 8 hours ago [-]
We also have revenue. They're a public company.
You can look all this stuff up yourself.
inigyou 6 hours ago [-]
Why didn't you post that number then. I have to assume because it contradicts the point you wanted to make.
PonyoSunshine 17 hours ago [-]
Azure is Microsoft's attempt to get into the market that Amazon dominates with AWS. Microsoft traditionally was a software company. Microsoft today is a desperate company trying to make money and stay relevant in a world fed up with the bull crap that they have been peddling over the years. Windows could have been so much more and better, but it's now a sold out clown show, just like XBox, just like Office, just like every other thing they have ever made. In the 35+ years I have been around Microsoft products, I have never seen a product where they didn't over promise and under deliver. Frankly, that is their MO: Over promise, under deliver, and move on the moment they have squeezed every dime they can out of a product. They are not an honest company, they never have been.
rustcleaner 15 hours ago [-]
IMO it all started going downhill for Microslop with Windows Product Activation in Windows XP. That was the first shot across the bow and sign they were going to be user-hostile.
Now they want to neuter the KMS server emulators.
pjmlp 11 hours ago [-]
This still do much better than GCP, and quite relevant as 4 trillion valued company.
It's just an internet meme phrase. "X is not a serious Y" just means that X is a joke.
It's a dumb phrase and overused in contexts like this.
antonvs 16 hours ago [-]
That’s not the meaning here. It means that Microsoft lacks the qualities required to be taken seriously, like competence or reliability.
pfdietz 22 hours ago [-]
"Is not serious" is not serious?
Gys 1 days ago [-]
As long as the legal department is very serious, that might work rather well.
rvba 13 hours ago [-]
Until nobody uses your products anymore.
Just like you know to never use anything from Google apart from ads (since everything else can get cancelled next month)
inigyou 8 hours ago [-]
They don't care about end users. Like Oracle, they care about corporate and government contracts.
WalterBright 21 hours ago [-]
It's what happens when you don't have a backup strategy. Even paper works as a backup.
tlogan 21 hours ago [-]
Selling backup for data that is stored in the cloud (whether selling solution as a provider or selling any solution (even free one) internally to your team), is one of the hardest things in the world.
somenameforme 19 hours ago [-]
I'd have to imagine that naivete is broadly declining at a quite sharp rate. Perhaps the greatest broad accomplishment of the powers that be.
inigyou 8 hours ago [-]
Not among corporations and governments, who are Microsoft's target audience. They have an extreme BAU bias.
alemanek 20 hours ago [-]
Just got a little easier I imagine.
lynndotpy 1 days ago [-]
Microsoft is serious because the world is full of people with needs who do not know better and Microsoft is still the default to serve those needs.
Something does not have to be useful, benign, consistent, worthwhile, or deserving to exist in order to be serious.
For example: Losing an arm and an eye to a fireworks accident, being grievously assaulted in an alley, or having Microsoft arbitrarily delete all your data, are all very serious things. So, I think it is fair to say Microsoft can still be called serious.
margalabargala 23 hours ago [-]
No.
Just because an entity is able to do things with serious consequences, does not mean they are a serious entity.
For other examples, see school shooters in the US.
brookst 19 hours ago [-]
Drink drivers and other reckless endangerment as well.
margalabargala 18 hours ago [-]
Right, exactly. "Oh yeah? Well I drive drunk" is not a valid rebuttal to "you are not a serious person".
thaumasiotes 15 hours ago [-]
I think you misread your parent comment; he drives drink, not drunk.
bigbuppo 10 minutes ago [-]
Yes, Microsoft is to blame, specifically all current c-suite execs. They're so addicted to increasing their subscription revenue they're willing to burn down everything good they've ever done for just one more dollar.
Expect carnage when a handful of large customers say, "Enough is enough" and jump ship.
I really highly doubt that. The way Microsoft uses the “for business” branding is not in an IRS/legal way to distinguish between for-profit vs nonprofit entities. Rather more like “Discord vs Slack” or “a subreddit vs zendesk” type offering.
“For Organizations” would really have been a more appropriate branding. Governments around the world, including the US government, used plenty of “For Business” software from Microsoft. However, the “for business” branding tells you where the money came from.
So a nonprofit would almost certainly be on a “for business” subscription type. That is to distinguish it from a “for students”, “for home”, or the default “for one person” subscription type.
brookst 19 hours ago [-]
The massive disconnect between “should” and “how the systems really work” that even people at Microsoft don’t know.
sixtyj 1 days ago [-]
Cloud is nice if it works. Web hosting is nice if you pay for it.
In history timeline, future archaeologists will probably see almost nothing, some books… as we are used to past centuries. But clouds, servers… gone.
BTW don’t use SSD for archiving.
rbanffy 24 hours ago [-]
Never keep your data and your backups in the same place. That’s true for in-office servers, data-centres and cloud. If you must use cloud, use two different providers for your own services and backups.
Also, have a disaster recovery plan ready, and exercise it regularly.
3RTB297 15 hours ago [-]
It really can't be understated how many non-profits operate on a shoestring budget and over-extend that few staff they can afford as a standard operating procedure, and have very low technical skill among everyone as they're mission-focused with what little resources they have.
I've worked with and for a couple non-profits where IT help was someone's spouse or kid or brother willing to help out. Often I've been the spouse. Often a shared Google drive filled with poorly managed PII is the solution that works well enough...until something bad happens.
rbanffy 12 hours ago [-]
I know. I would expect a very hands-off backup process (for files it’d work better - it’s easy to set up file backups from a OneDrive to a cloud backup service), and, if the recovery is easy and obvious enough, the need to exercise it falls by a lot.
$500 also buys you 20+TB of local storage. It’s not cheap, and many non-profits might struggle with that, but it’s also a way to ensure that even if the world ends, the data is somewhere.
sixtyj 21 hours ago [-]
Maybe I am in echo chamber, but none I know exercised recovery plan… ;) except of power plants and othe critical infrastructures, and maybe large enterprises. Others imho use 3–2-1 approach but haven’t tried to recover data.
rbanffy 12 hours ago [-]
I am happy to say I have a different experience, but I’m in a different echo chamber, and have been in very regulated spaces where DORA is unforgiving. Ideally, for a non-profit, you want a hands-off process as much as you can. If you need to, backup to whatever your cloud provider has for S3 buckets, on a different account.
dgellow 22 hours ago [-]
As a society we actually generate a lots of books. Future generations wouldn’t be missing too much without the internet I think. Also, not everything is worth preserving. Easily 90% of Reddit is complete garbage
inigyou 8 hours ago [-]
That was in 2018. I'd upgrade it now to 99.99%.
sixtyj 21 hours ago [-]
Sure 90% of internet is foam of days.
NordSteve 1 days ago [-]
I'm a tenant admin for a non profit. Just looked and I have 8 emails to two different addresses warning me about the transition.
None were caught in the Microsoft or Fastmail spam filters.
danpalmer 16 hours ago [-]
That's good, but this article explicitly covers this with multiple people citing not receiving any contact.
22 hours ago [-]
what-the-grump 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
WalterBright 21 hours ago [-]
I abandoned Microsoft Outlook Express many years ago after discovering that it kept the files in hidden directories, and were in some scrambled, undocumented format. There was no backup mechanism for it.
I replaced it with Thunderbird Mail.
fingerlocks 7 hours ago [-]
Good news! New outlook stores each email in a separate tarball of html.
Bad news for your hard drive though
rectang 16 hours ago [-]
Why not start with a brownout? Make the data temporarily inaccessible, but don’t actually delete it immediately.
rvba 13 hours ago [-]
Satya has to go. It feels he is there to keep costs low, not to do things correctly.
One of the first moves was to get rid of QA
inigyou 8 hours ago [-]
In the current business environment, keeping costs low is the correct way to do things, and quality is completely irrelevant.
isolay 6 hours ago [-]
I honestly can’t tell if you’re serious.
verytrivial 13 hours ago [-]
As other mention, the "right" way to do this is to withdraw access but keep the data for at least 30days. At least.
Let people give you money instead of them vowing to never trust you again in any sphere of influence they have.
systemstops 15 hours ago [-]
That was devastating to a summer camp that do so volunteer IT work for. By the time they called me, the data was long gone.
ahepp 24 hours ago [-]
> On Reddit, and across Microsoft’s own Tech Community forums, more such claims abound of surprise deletion without notification.
I clicked the link with text “more such claims”, and it appears to be someone complaining about being unable to reach a human after their devices were physically stolen. Not sure how that’s related to the claims in the article.
Meanwhile, other AI firms are thirsty for data - Microsoft could have just slipped in a terms of service change to allow training (it’s sort of in there already), and presto, exabytes of data to train on, with full metadata so you even know if it’s pre-2022.
krunck 2 hours ago [-]
Not your servers, not your data.
foolinaround 18 hours ago [-]
considering that most non-profits barely have any data, i dont know what MS' incentive is, in not holding on to the data... it definitely must be in the TBs
verytrivial 13 hours ago [-]
Someone had an "income per tenant" performance metric perhaps?
pdonis 1 days ago [-]
Did Microsoft give fair warning of what was going to happen to the data in the cloud that was stored there under these licenses? (I don't have a Slate account so I can't read the full article to see if this is addressed.)
vtbassmatt 24 hours ago [-]
Yes. Disclosure: I work at Microsoft. But I also am the volunteer IT guy at a nonprofit, and am speaking entirely in that context.
I was quite unhappy to get a mail back in (checks archives) January that our grant would be discontinued and we’d either have to make do with the web versions of things, migrate someplace, or start paying. They also reminded us several more times before the drop date. I don’t really understand why Microsoft chose to discontinue the nonprofit grants, and it put a little egg on my face after I had recommended it to our board — but they definitely notified us of the change and what it would mean.
We’ve opted to pay for now; it’s $3/user/month for the SKU that gets full desktop versions of Office, Teams, etc. so not really breaking the bank compared to all the other things we have to pay for.
V__ 21 hours ago [-]
A non-profit I help out sometimes, was affected, and I have to say the emails were not that clear. Because it's hard to figure out what is part of a license, the free tier etc. I let it lapse, because we migrated of Office, but apparently the license also applied to Intune.
Fine, so I bought licenses but apparently Microsoft deletes "some" of the data. All groups were still there, users and the device ids.. but not the devices themselves. I could see all devices associated to a user but couldn't recreate or restore them in device management. Thus, I had to re-enroll multiple devices. Will migrate off Intune in the future, since it's garbage but haven't found a good alternative for Android devices yet.
rbanffy 24 hours ago [-]
If 150,000+ organisations were caught by surprise, I would say it’s clear whatever communication they had was not adequate.
Organisations that didn’t have an off-boarding option (do nothing, pay the minimum, I’ll deal with it) selected should receive monthly reminders, then every 2 weeks (to multiple people), and one per week until a VERY alarming one the week before. And, of course, have all systems shut down and the data archived for a grace period.
I hope they sue Microsoft for what seems neglect.
ahepp 21 hours ago [-]
I think we should take the headline claim that "over 170k nonprofits lost all their data" with a huge grain of salt.
As far as I can tell, the only source for that claim is:
> And he later learned he wasn’t alone, when another company service representative called the very next day and told him that roughly 171,000 small nongovernmental organizations “lost everything” in their OneDrive accounts.
So a second hand account of remarks said over the phone by a low level employee/contractor.
That's an interesting data point to follow up on, but using a single indirectly relayed statement to make such a substantial claim doesn't seem consistent with journalistic standards.
rbanffy 12 hours ago [-]
Let’s say our grain of salt lowers that number by 80%. That’s still more than 20,000 non-profits losing all their data.
That’s still a pretty ridiculous number.
23 hours ago [-]
23 hours ago [-]
iwontberude 21 hours ago [-]
Sounds like they’re struggling for cash flow if they’re doing stupid shit like this
akudha 23 hours ago [-]
Does that mean it is 170000 * 10 * 3 = 5,100,000 per month (assuming 10 users per org)? Isn’t that less than found in the cushion level money for a trillion dollar company?
itopaloglu83 20 hours ago [-]
The same company that puts ads to their weather app on their desktop OS you mean?
Or managed to turn the good old notepad into a CVE 8 vulnerability?
Kidding aside, some bean counter somewhere thought that’s $5M revenue lost, instead of helping the community they’re supposedly a part of.
NordSteve 1 days ago [-]
The second paragraph of the email:
We strongly advise transitioning your users to a different Microsoft 365 offer for nonprofits, before the subscription is cancelled, to avoid disruption and data loss. Connect now with your current Microsoft partner – or find a partner – to get started. Learn more about what happens to your data and access when your subscription ends.
I wish they’d just use clear and blunt language, rather than “strongly advise” and “to avoid.” I’m reminded of my bank sending “Important account information” mail that contains advertising OR actual important information, but at like a 20:1 ratio.
“YOUR FILES WILL BE DELETED ON {DATE}” seems like it would have solved any ambiguity.
Dylan16807 18 hours ago [-]
More important than that is you have a date where you lock the data, and a date where you actually delete it, and those dates are months apart. Even if the emails are going into a black hole that shouldn't result in data loss. Don't have everything working as usual one day and gone forever the next.
xaksnTMu2 13 hours ago [-]
To be fair I get “YOUR FILES WILL BE DELETED ON {DATE}” spam for every fay of the year, I would not be surprised legit emails are getting blocked if they contain that phrase in title - and having it in the body doesn't help either with the amount of "Important update to our terms of service" emails.
robomc 22 hours ago [-]
Yeah the subject of the email should be "Action Required To Prevent Data Loss" or something
marcus_holmes 17 hours ago [-]
I would almost certainly delete that as spam, since I receive approximately 34987349873964 emails per minute with that exact subject, all of which are intended to do me harm
crooked-v 17 hours ago [-]
That's some real nightmarishly passive-aggressive wording. It reads to me like the kind of thing intentionally structured to leave people confused until after the deletions are already done, so then it's too late to argue about the free service being removed.
lynndotpy 1 days ago [-]
> What happened to Khosla was just one instance of a crisis that has rocked small nonprofit owners across the globe, who allege that Microsoft failed to communicate with them in a substantive manner about the license cancellations and left them unable to prepare their organizations for the future. As they’ve related online, these already resource-strapped nonprofits have lost troves of data, are struggling to continue their operations, and have been left unable to make up the technology gaps with alternative services. People who run service orgs with low budgets and benefited for years from Microsoft’s programs no longer have much of the technology they need to keep things going—for either the short or long term.
This quote contains linked sources but I can't see them since they're largely on Reddit and Facebook. The Microsoft ones suggest people were blindsided by this cancellation, and that the official support channels in Microsoft are broken. It seems like everyone who was blindsided also tried to submit an official support ticket and was unable to, which is in line with my experience interacting with Microsoft.
rbanffy 24 hours ago [-]
> the official support channels in Microsoft are broken
I can say, from first hand experience, the very best cloud providers have support channels that are, at the very least, unpleasant to use.
_joel 22 hours ago [-]
Yes, but its seems Microsoft is the most broken.
crooked-v 17 hours ago [-]
Apple is decent. The internal processes are opaque, but you can always pretty easily talk to a real person who can and will escalate things to real internal support teams as soon as the CSR scripts no longer apply.
rbanffy 12 hours ago [-]
Apple has always been brilliant, but they don’t offer a full spectrum of cloud services.
danpalmer 16 hours ago [-]
The article cites two people who say they didn't receive fair warning, and one who acted on it to renew their subscription to avoid the data loss who lost everything anyway, so seemingly: no.
rustcleaner 15 hours ago [-]
This is the fruits of subscribing (even if it was 'free').
#NeverSubscribe
#OnPremAlways
fergie 14 hours ago [-]
Meanwhile, my Flickr account still has my pics despite threatening to delete them for like 15 years.
m463 16 hours ago [-]
couldn't the bill and melinda gates foundation (if still called that) help with this?
Hendrikto 11 hours ago [-]
Do not rely on the generosity of corporations, I guess.
pkphilip 5 hours ago [-]
Amazing! How in the world is Microsoft able to get away with something like this?!
Even a smaller software company will have better systems to ensure that the customers don't lose all of their data.
exabrial 21 hours ago [-]
Who is still using Windows
kraussvonespy 5 hours ago [-]
Approximiately 60-70% of desktop / laptop users worldwide use Windows according to wikipedia.
The big problem with shifting users from Windows is training. Corporations aren't going to pay to train their employees in something new if they don't absolutely have to. With that said, now that Windows workstation prices going crazy because of RAM/storage/GPU inflation, I hope that we see a shift to more memory efficient operating systems (anything based on UNIX like Linux and MacOS) but need 2x-8x memory (along with fast storage) to have a similar experience running Windows 11.
thunderfork 19 hours ago [-]
Businesses?
usr1106 15 hours ago [-]
Governments. Many housholds, I guess over 50% in many countries.
It's a cancer.
Ylpertnodi 5 hours ago [-]
Me (W10).
It runs the software I use.
rustcleaner 15 hours ago [-]
I do, but inside a qube in Qubes OS. :^)
Aeolun 14 hours ago [-]
So they built their thing on free handouts and were surprised that didn’t continue?
verytrivial 13 hours ago [-]
Sure, but there's a difference between losing the website hosting your bottomless mimosa brunch school reunion, and a non-profit organisations losing all their shared files after taking up an offer of a no-cost a license from MSFT to support their mission. The nature of the "thing" matters IMO.
tgv 13 hours ago [-]
Depends on what information was given at the moment of "handout." I cannot remember reading anywhere that your data would be deleted when you opened a free account. Data and storage limits, that was it.
motohagiography 21 hours ago [-]
If the records for many of these NGO's get subpoenaed, it sounds like some of them can claim force majeure? So shocked.
isolay 8 hours ago [-]
Yes. Clear exception to Betteridge's law of headlines.
neuroelectron 17 hours ago [-]
This is no accident. Microsoft knew exactly what they're doing, working through notifying and transitioning 170,000 customers is a lot of work. That work isn't free for Microsoft to provide. Cutting them off probably saved them $billions and many years of expensive, partial service deprecation.
verytrivial 13 hours ago [-]
Maybe. There's also about five guys at my work who would have loved the opportunity to use an LLM to set up a "non-propfit-brownout-pipeline-orchestrator" to transition 99% of these account to either a newly billable account, or a "bye-bye.zip" export available to the admin account. Two weeks of effort, tops.
ares623 23 hours ago [-]
There must always be an "Oracle". With Oracle at risk due to its AI investments, it is fitting that Microsoft takes its place.
vfclists 7 hours ago [-]
Which part of the widely held and propagated opinions that such big corporations are owned and run by sociopaths/psychopaths do these NGOs not understand?
iwontberude 21 hours ago [-]
[dead]
effnorwood 21 hours ago [-]
[dead]
jmclnx 1 days ago [-]
Yes :)
But really depends. I saw somewhere NPR lost 70 years of content doe to a Cloud bill not being paid on time or something ? I forgot the details.
I am sure there will be more of this since companies are depending on the Cloud for their data storage. Now with AI, who knows what will happen. I expect Cloud Admin people will eventually be replaced by some AI type system.
Companies really should backup all data and send off-site. But that will never happen because god-forbid, they will need to hire a real person.
mentalfist 1 days ago [-]
Nine PBS (PBS member station) lost 50tb/70 years of archives due to cloud provider ending operations abruptly
They lost data because of their incompetence and not actually having any backups.
rbanffy 24 hours ago [-]
Their cloud provider was in charge of backups.
KetoManx64 23 hours ago [-]
You can try to offload responsibility from them, but every IT and DevOps person that has an inkling of competence knows you don't store your backups in the same place as your prod data.
etc-hosts 18 hours ago [-]
hard to run your production in Iron Mountain backup tier
_joel 22 hours ago [-]
It wasn't?
Dylan16807 18 hours ago [-]
In the sense that I haven't seen any evidence there were backups, yeah they didn't have backups and prod in the same location.
Or are you nitpicking about the word "prod"? Pretend they said "primary copy" instead.
_joel 11 hours ago [-]
In the sense that what the op wrote was wrong. You know, factually incorrect, bull, a yarn. Speaking as someone who used to let Iron Mountain come in to take backup tapes *off premises*
Dylan16807 2 hours ago [-]
I've given Iron Mountain backup tapes too. That's not what happened here.
OSS was in charge of storage, and they appear to have had the only cop[ies] in an Iron Mountain facility. This setup was fundamentally broken.
Please be specific about what you think KetoManx64 got wrong.
If there were no backups then their initial statement was right. If there were "backups" in the same location then their revised statement was basically right, just don't nitpick the word "prod". If there's evidence of any copies existing anywhere else, like you would have in a normal contract directly with Iron Mountain, please link that evidence. It doesn't sound like the PBS station had a primary copy that was backed up by OSS, they gave the primary copy to OSS.
rbanffy 3 hours ago [-]
I always advise people who have backup tapes to have a local copy AND the one Iron Mountain takes to their fortress.
ButlerianJihad 1 days ago [-]
False: they did not lose the data; they temporarily lost access to it, because of Iron Mountain's security policies. They are, necessarily, pursuing remedies in court. They can and will regain access.
1 days ago [-]
WalterBright 21 hours ago [-]
And today you can buy a 20tb drive for under a grand.
cavem0nkey 22 hours ago [-]
No Microsoft is not to blame. Whoever sells themselves into an all encompassing ecosystem with no exit plan or backup is to blame. It’s absolutely stupid thinking even if it’s the norm these days.
The cloud is a convenience at most and an expensive one. You do everything you need to do somewhere else and pray that no one else gets in or you get shot.
This is a warning to everyone else. Heed it.
tomhow 22 hours ago [-]
Please avoid this kind of scolding, berating tone on HN, and omit sneers, swipes, and name-calling from comments. The guidelines make it clear we're here for curious conversation, not this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
cavem0nkey 13 hours ago [-]
Sorry I didn't feel this was scolding but I look back and see it may be taken that way.
The nature of the comment was that we should strip the narrative about this being a non-profit from the discussion and apply what is left to ourselves. It acts as a warning that we should really evaluate and consider our trust relations with a vendor who has control over everything that we do. And make sure we don't make the same mistakes.
snayan 17 hours ago [-]
Brother, you are living in a bubble.
This article is about a group of people who are trying to make the world a better place in their own little way. Many of them do not have the technical skillset to understand the potential future problems they have since run into. Many of them, as you acknowledged, probably chose this option for convenience. Is it ideal? No. Is it the reality of the world we live in? Yes.
A bit of empathy goes a long way, doesn't cost you anything. You're not going to win many people over to your cause with this kind of vitriol.
cavem0nkey 13 hours ago [-]
Sorry if the tone was off but I'm trying to peel off the layers of narrative on this and get to the real story. And that is the all too common story of a combination of poorly defined and enforced policy by a vendor and a strategy of hope and ignorance from a customer.
The non-profit part of it is moot. This could happen to anyone. I'm more than a little annoyed that "non-profit" and "charity" is used to shape opinion. Having worked for a charity before, they aren't necessarily the bastions of moral virtue even when claiming non-profit status. I've seen cash efficiencies so low that there's almost no point in them existing. Not that it matters, again because this problem applies to non-profit and profit organisations.
Thus this should be a warning to people here to make sure that you have an exit plan and a strategy if you use the services regardless of who you are or what you do. Not hatred of the vendor. Because every single vendor out there can arbitrarily cut you off from a service at their will through automation, incompetence or malicious behaviour and there's probably nothing you can do about it.
Brian_K_White 22 hours ago [-]
MS is absolutely to blame for their part. Sure also the victim should have known better. So what?
cavem0nkey 22 hours ago [-]
Microsoft wouldn’t have a business if there weren’t so many fools around.
vkaku 1 days ago [-]
People are better off using LibreOffice on a Linux desktop
KetoManx64 1 days ago [-]
As a daily Linux user and enthusiast, I detest statements like this. You did not read the article not the problem that those companies have and your only solution is "Use LibreOffice" without any actual interest in what their problem is or what an actual solution to their problems is. People like you push newbies away from Linux.
Using LibreOffice does not give you web sharing, nor permission systems, nor automation workflows, nor easy to use access controls, nor so many other things.
nchmy 22 hours ago [-]
Also, libreoffice is just unequivocally worse than MS Office - it is actively painful to use their spreadsheet, for example.
dh2022 19 hours ago [-]
What features, besides macros which I haven;t used, are you finding worse in Libre Office than in MS Office?
I am using Libre Office for me household budget, and keeping track of cooking recipes. It is much better than MS Office because:
1. In Libre I can tell at a glance what my active cell is;
2. On my wife’s laptop at least, Office installed a DRM service that basically makes impossible to work on personal files on her work computer.
3. MS office insists each time I save a file to put it on OneDrive. Then I have to clock around to find the local folder and eventually save it locally. Libre just saves it locally from the first try,
vkaku 23 hours ago [-]
Nope. I actually care enough to make this statement. Using such subscription products and then getting rug pulled isn't something easy for non technical users.
So just start with sovereign, better governed products with clear transparent pricing and better affordability to begin with.
Data interchange formats are more important than ever, and having programs that don't do too many things is just as important.
Not everyone starts thinking about Google Docs or WebDAV to begin with, and actually ... LibreOffice does a decent job here.
Don't bring up imaginary problems on Linux that people don't have. Losing access to accounts on a computer or a cloud service due to skunky companies is totally happening today though.
Brian_K_White 22 hours ago [-]
As another linux user, as in for everything, desktop, home & work, not just servers at work, for decades by now... they were correct. This kind of statement is counterproductive. It might not be thoughtless, but if not then it's the result of poor quality thought, so lack of thought would actually be the lesser insult.
_joel 22 hours ago [-]
Again, you're clearly showing you know nothing about running actual IT for actual companies.
vkaku 22 hours ago [-]
Oh Boo Hoo. IT departments for Non Profits that aren't actually like OpenAI. Right.
_joel 20 hours ago [-]
Yes, I'm a CTO for one.
vkaku 19 hours ago [-]
Running Non Profit and managing infrastructure for pennies, is a real problem these non profits / small companies face.
If a multi trillion dollar company won't afford to burn a few million a month, good luck getting any of these folks to buy and host their Sharepoint for cheap.
This is not just a technical problem, and you know it. These people need real solutions, and asking for them to have an IT department isn't practically economical for them.
_joel 12 hours ago [-]
The solution isn't telling them to use a linux desktop.
vkaku 9 hours ago [-]
It actually is. Don't concentrate compute and data risks in a few vendors centralized who currently don't do a good job of hosting them nor saving them well.
It obviously costs money to run cloud storage and compute, do use whatever is available at hand first.
Microsoft is forcing people to use OneDrive on Windows and Office 365 by default, not realizing that it doesn't want to pay for dealing with all of this.
The centralized model is already failing, these providers are storing data they can't decide about and people are being forced to pay for features they don't need to use at all. None of these things help your case.
etc-hosts 18 hours ago [-]
looks like theyre also doing MDM on their org's devices.
tjwebbnorfolk 22 hours ago [-]
Statements like this immediately reveal that the commenter has never once seen a real live corporate IT department
dh2022 19 hours ago [-]
I was a Financial Analyst at Amazon and Starbucks for about 15 years total. Excel was my favorite tool. I used to say that if my employer would not pay for Excel I would pay for it out of me own money.
Almost 20 years later in 2026 I migrated all my personal stuff to Linux and Libre Office. I am amazed how much better this is than the Windows + Office setup my wife uses.
Just today I helped my wife with an Excel file. I can’t believe what garbage Excel is in 2026. For reference- I tried to use the Formula -> Show Dependent Cells feature. This feature showed NO dependent cells - even though these were in the row below. What a piece of garbage Excel became.
oofabz 14 hours ago [-]
I was shocked when I imported a 1.5M row dataset into Office365 Excel and found that it had silently cropped my data to 1048576 rows. One million items is a ridiculously low limit for a modern computer, and deleting 1/3 of my data without any warning is unacceptable. 20 years ago Excel could handle 1.5 million rows without breaking a sweat but this webpage version isn't real Excel.
So I used Gnumeric instead and it worked fine.
rvba 13 hours ago [-]
Excel has a limit of 1M rows now just like it 20 years ago.
The 2003 version had a 64k row limit.
I agree with what you write though: limit could be increased + webpage version is pure garbage.
vkaku 22 hours ago [-]
Right. Well funded corporate IT environments losing access to their data because Microsoft screws them over. Perfect. That's not what I'm reading here.
Secondly, instead of doing a rug pull, what's wrong with a 2-month brownout period? Only allow the admin to login, put OneDrive in read-only mode. That will alert all users clearly.
Thirdly instead of fending of the questions from slate.com with Orwellian corporate speak, they should acknowledge their mistake and spend a couple of weeks of the highly paid engineers to see whether they can recover the data. Why is it always so hard for MS to say "Sorry, we made a mistake".
Seems like no corpos ever want to say that. Surely it’s not because of some pride or PR? I’m guessing such an admission might also sometimes have legal risks?
"He renewed Canopy’s yearly license last October, and Microsoft had emailed him to confirm he would retain access until Oct. 4, 2026"
Someone decided to pull the plug anyways.
When people say a company is unserious they almost always mean that they're not thinking about, and taking seriously, the work that their customers do. This seems like a classic example of that.
Some define a standard others set it. This came up when my employer was applying for business continuity insurance
Just, you know, taking business seriously. Like they did even 6 or 8 years ago.
The core business now is execs ego-stroking each other and hoping disaster strikes after they cash out.
When Satya came in there was a dramatic shift in culture, and things were improving. I won’t argue they were super-serious, but at least getting better, and focusing on the business rather than the internal strife that Balmer loved to much.
But now… just the opposite. This IS a deeply unserious business. The tech bros got the keys to the combine and have no idea WTF to do, so it’s all cosplay.
A serious company would never have allowed its core product to turn into the clown show it currently is, yet here we are, a massive corporation pushes an OS that feels vibe coded, and is largly propped up by what little residual community goodwill/ignorance exsists.
Azure's cost of revenue is someplace between 14% (Productivity and Business Processes) and 36% (Intelligent Cloud). Software is 1%.
Looks to me like Software pays for the whole thing.
You can look all this stuff up yourself.
Now they want to neuter the KMS server emulators.
It's a dumb phrase and overused in contexts like this.
Just like you know to never use anything from Google apart from ads (since everything else can get cancelled next month)
Something does not have to be useful, benign, consistent, worthwhile, or deserving to exist in order to be serious.
For example: Losing an arm and an eye to a fireworks accident, being grievously assaulted in an alley, or having Microsoft arbitrarily delete all your data, are all very serious things. So, I think it is fair to say Microsoft can still be called serious.
Just because an entity is able to do things with serious consequences, does not mean they are a serious entity.
For other examples, see school shooters in the US.
Expect carnage when a handful of large customers say, "Enough is enough" and jump ship.
I suspect the nonprofit arrangement is not an example of a "Microsoft 365 for business subscription"
Although the old nonprofit FAQ calls it, "the Microsoft 365 Business Premium nonprofit offer" https://web.archive.org/web/20260223193546/https://www.micro...
“For Organizations” would really have been a more appropriate branding. Governments around the world, including the US government, used plenty of “For Business” software from Microsoft. However, the “for business” branding tells you where the money came from.
So a nonprofit would almost certainly be on a “for business” subscription type. That is to distinguish it from a “for students”, “for home”, or the default “for one person” subscription type.
In history timeline, future archaeologists will probably see almost nothing, some books… as we are used to past centuries. But clouds, servers… gone.
BTW don’t use SSD for archiving.
Also, have a disaster recovery plan ready, and exercise it regularly.
I've worked with and for a couple non-profits where IT help was someone's spouse or kid or brother willing to help out. Often I've been the spouse. Often a shared Google drive filled with poorly managed PII is the solution that works well enough...until something bad happens.
$500 also buys you 20+TB of local storage. It’s not cheap, and many non-profits might struggle with that, but it’s also a way to ensure that even if the world ends, the data is somewhere.
None were caught in the Microsoft or Fastmail spam filters.
I replaced it with Thunderbird Mail.
One of the first moves was to get rid of QA
Let people give you money instead of them vowing to never trust you again in any sphere of influence they have.
I clicked the link with text “more such claims”, and it appears to be someone complaining about being unable to reach a human after their devices were physically stolen. Not sure how that’s related to the claims in the article.
https://www.reddit.com/r/FuckMicrosoft/comments/1ub7i1h/micr...
I was quite unhappy to get a mail back in (checks archives) January that our grant would be discontinued and we’d either have to make do with the web versions of things, migrate someplace, or start paying. They also reminded us several more times before the drop date. I don’t really understand why Microsoft chose to discontinue the nonprofit grants, and it put a little egg on my face after I had recommended it to our board — but they definitely notified us of the change and what it would mean.
We’ve opted to pay for now; it’s $3/user/month for the SKU that gets full desktop versions of Office, Teams, etc. so not really breaking the bank compared to all the other things we have to pay for.
Fine, so I bought licenses but apparently Microsoft deletes "some" of the data. All groups were still there, users and the device ids.. but not the devices themselves. I could see all devices associated to a user but couldn't recreate or restore them in device management. Thus, I had to re-enroll multiple devices. Will migrate off Intune in the future, since it's garbage but haven't found a good alternative for Android devices yet.
Organisations that didn’t have an off-boarding option (do nothing, pay the minimum, I’ll deal with it) selected should receive monthly reminders, then every 2 weeks (to multiple people), and one per week until a VERY alarming one the week before. And, of course, have all systems shut down and the data archived for a grace period.
I hope they sue Microsoft for what seems neglect.
As far as I can tell, the only source for that claim is:
> And he later learned he wasn’t alone, when another company service representative called the very next day and told him that roughly 171,000 small nongovernmental organizations “lost everything” in their OneDrive accounts.
So a second hand account of remarks said over the phone by a low level employee/contractor.
That's an interesting data point to follow up on, but using a single indirectly relayed statement to make such a substantial claim doesn't seem consistent with journalistic standards.
That’s still a pretty ridiculous number.
Or managed to turn the good old notepad into a CVE 8 vulnerability?
Kidding aside, some bean counter somewhere thought that’s $5M revenue lost, instead of helping the community they’re supposedly a part of.
We strongly advise transitioning your users to a different Microsoft 365 offer for nonprofits, before the subscription is cancelled, to avoid disruption and data loss. Connect now with your current Microsoft partner – or find a partner – to get started. Learn more about what happens to your data and access when your subscription ends.
That last sentence links to https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/commerce/sub...
“YOUR FILES WILL BE DELETED ON {DATE}” seems like it would have solved any ambiguity.
This quote contains linked sources but I can't see them since they're largely on Reddit and Facebook. The Microsoft ones suggest people were blindsided by this cancellation, and that the official support channels in Microsoft are broken. It seems like everyone who was blindsided also tried to submit an official support ticket and was unable to, which is in line with my experience interacting with Microsoft.
I can say, from first hand experience, the very best cloud providers have support channels that are, at the very least, unpleasant to use.
#NeverSubscribe #OnPremAlways
Even a smaller software company will have better systems to ensure that the customers don't lose all of their data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...
The big problem with shifting users from Windows is training. Corporations aren't going to pay to train their employees in something new if they don't absolutely have to. With that said, now that Windows workstation prices going crazy because of RAM/storage/GPU inflation, I hope that we see a shift to more memory efficient operating systems (anything based on UNIX like Linux and MacOS) but need 2x-8x memory (along with fast storage) to have a similar experience running Windows 11.
It's a cancer.
But really depends. I saw somewhere NPR lost 70 years of content doe to a Cloud bill not being paid on time or something ? I forgot the details.
I am sure there will be more of this since companies are depending on the Cloud for their data storage. Now with AI, who knows what will happen. I expect Cloud Admin people will eventually be replaced by some AI type system.
Companies really should backup all data and send off-site. But that will never happen because god-forbid, they will need to hire a real person.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49285418 - "Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data" - 229 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49333344 - "Judge sets framework for Nine PBS to retrieve archival data" - 75 comments
Or are you nitpicking about the word "prod"? Pretend they said "primary copy" instead.
OSS was in charge of storage, and they appear to have had the only cop[ies] in an Iron Mountain facility. This setup was fundamentally broken.
Please be specific about what you think KetoManx64 got wrong.
If there were no backups then their initial statement was right. If there were "backups" in the same location then their revised statement was basically right, just don't nitpick the word "prod". If there's evidence of any copies existing anywhere else, like you would have in a normal contract directly with Iron Mountain, please link that evidence. It doesn't sound like the PBS station had a primary copy that was backed up by OSS, they gave the primary copy to OSS.
The cloud is a convenience at most and an expensive one. You do everything you need to do somewhere else and pray that no one else gets in or you get shot.
This is a warning to everyone else. Heed it.
The nature of the comment was that we should strip the narrative about this being a non-profit from the discussion and apply what is left to ourselves. It acts as a warning that we should really evaluate and consider our trust relations with a vendor who has control over everything that we do. And make sure we don't make the same mistakes.
This article is about a group of people who are trying to make the world a better place in their own little way. Many of them do not have the technical skillset to understand the potential future problems they have since run into. Many of them, as you acknowledged, probably chose this option for convenience. Is it ideal? No. Is it the reality of the world we live in? Yes.
A bit of empathy goes a long way, doesn't cost you anything. You're not going to win many people over to your cause with this kind of vitriol.
The non-profit part of it is moot. This could happen to anyone. I'm more than a little annoyed that "non-profit" and "charity" is used to shape opinion. Having worked for a charity before, they aren't necessarily the bastions of moral virtue even when claiming non-profit status. I've seen cash efficiencies so low that there's almost no point in them existing. Not that it matters, again because this problem applies to non-profit and profit organisations.
Thus this should be a warning to people here to make sure that you have an exit plan and a strategy if you use the services regardless of who you are or what you do. Not hatred of the vendor. Because every single vendor out there can arbitrarily cut you off from a service at their will through automation, incompetence or malicious behaviour and there's probably nothing you can do about it.
Using LibreOffice does not give you web sharing, nor permission systems, nor automation workflows, nor easy to use access controls, nor so many other things.
I am using Libre Office for me household budget, and keeping track of cooking recipes. It is much better than MS Office because:
1. In Libre I can tell at a glance what my active cell is;
2. On my wife’s laptop at least, Office installed a DRM service that basically makes impossible to work on personal files on her work computer.
3. MS office insists each time I save a file to put it on OneDrive. Then I have to clock around to find the local folder and eventually save it locally. Libre just saves it locally from the first try,
So just start with sovereign, better governed products with clear transparent pricing and better affordability to begin with.
Data interchange formats are more important than ever, and having programs that don't do too many things is just as important.
Not everyone starts thinking about Google Docs or WebDAV to begin with, and actually ... LibreOffice does a decent job here.
https://help.libreoffice.org/latest/en-US/text/shared/guide/...
Don't bring up imaginary problems on Linux that people don't have. Losing access to accounts on a computer or a cloud service due to skunky companies is totally happening today though.
If a multi trillion dollar company won't afford to burn a few million a month, good luck getting any of these folks to buy and host their Sharepoint for cheap.
This is not just a technical problem, and you know it. These people need real solutions, and asking for them to have an IT department isn't practically economical for them.
It obviously costs money to run cloud storage and compute, do use whatever is available at hand first.
Microsoft is forcing people to use OneDrive on Windows and Office 365 by default, not realizing that it doesn't want to pay for dealing with all of this.
The centralized model is already failing, these providers are storing data they can't decide about and people are being forced to pay for features they don't need to use at all. None of these things help your case.
Almost 20 years later in 2026 I migrated all my personal stuff to Linux and Libre Office. I am amazed how much better this is than the Windows + Office setup my wife uses.
Just today I helped my wife with an Excel file. I can’t believe what garbage Excel is in 2026. For reference- I tried to use the Formula -> Show Dependent Cells feature. This feature showed NO dependent cells - even though these were in the row below. What a piece of garbage Excel became.
So I used Gnumeric instead and it worked fine.
The 2003 version had a 64k row limit.
I agree with what you write though: limit could be increased + webpage version is pure garbage.