Is Microsoft Outlook Still Down? Company Says Service Has Been Restored - CNET
www.cnet.com
Other Microsoft services, including Copilot and Teams, also suffered outages.

cross-posted from: https://belgae.social/post/2546989

Indeed, all eggs are in one basket in Belgium. It is hard to find any exceptions whereby a government agency is independent and sovereign from Microsoft Corporation.

(edit) Can you fax them? Some agencies still have fax numbers. Not enough of them… it’s a shame to see fax die when it is the only somewhat universal electronic way to send a message without exposure to surveillance advertisers and their walled-garden barriers. This question really boils down to: are the fax numbers going to an inhouse decoder, or are they just 3rd party cloud services that repackage the faxes as an email?

update

Given details in this comment:

https://belgae.social/post/2547022/5282959

it’s perhaps inaccurate to say Belgium is 100% reliant on Microsoft for email. Parliament (lachambre.be) uses an email firewall which hides their email provider. The DNS TXT record shows an SPF entry with outlook·com, among others.

  • autonomousPunk@belgae.socialOPEnglish
    2·
    20 hours ago

    I thought it was generally the case that orgs would run their own Exchange server, but that those local servers were still dependent on a Microsoft host nontheless. I’ve not followed it too close though.

    • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      18 hours ago

      I had the opposite idea. OTOH, I’ve never run an exchange server and haven’t been in the MS ecosystem as an admin for 7-years.

      • autonomousPunk@belgae.socialOPEnglish
        1·
        5 hours ago

        For me it only matters if I can work out whether MS is in the loop. When an MX lookup yields simply “brucity-be.mail.protection.outlook.com”, that is a hostname that is specific to the city. It suggests that the city runs their own MS Exchange server. That is a typical config for most orgs. MS of course still wants to handle the traffic so they can see it and collect data for their advertising business under the guise/pretext of spam filtering. This is why I believe what I was told – that the Exchange server still connects to a host in Microsoft’s data center.

        If there is a source that covers this concretely, I would be interested because when I decide whether to send an email to some person or agency, whether MS is a MitM makes a critical difference in that decision. I see “outlook.com” in the domain name and avoid it.