Is Microsoft Outlook Still Down? Company Says Service Has Been Restored - CNET
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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.

  • Jayb151@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    15 hours ago

    Genuine question… If a government or business is using Microsoft for email, how do they not go 100%? Is the thought that they have multiple email providers?

    • autonomousPunk@belgae.socialOPEnglish
      1·
      6 hours ago

      The gov is not a single entity. There is parliament, a revenue service, an anti-competition authority, police, telecom regulator, etc. Probably hundreds of agencies. If each agency decides for itself who to outsource email to, that is one way to not be 100% reliant on MS.

      For a single entity, it is possible to have an MX record that points to multiple different hosts. I have never seen a Belgian gov agency list multiple choices. It’s almost always *protection.outlook.com. I asked around to try to get to the bottom of that and was told that Belgium decided to use Microsoft across the board for all agencies.

      I’ve just discovered that Parliament exceptionally uses an email firewall. But we can see in the SPF records that outlook is used for sending. So it is likely that outlook is also used behind the email firewall on email they receive. There is not enough transparency though. There are other services in the outbound SPF record. So IIUC, Parliament would have been able to /send/ email during Microsoft’s outtage. But we can only guess. Those other services on the v=spf1 line just suggest that they authorize outbound messages with alternate providers, not that their users are actually given that option or that email will travel that way.

      I suppose 100% may not be accurate considering this observation with Parliament. I will update the title.

      • Jayb151@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        41 minutes ago

        Really, genuinely, thank you for the detailed response! It brings another question to mind though. In simplistic terms, the suggestion seems to be that different governmental groups should just use different email providers? If that’s the case, who decides what provider each group uses? It’s there a body that would coordinate this kind of diversity within corporate or governmental groups? I guess really, the question is that is it is agreed that M$ provides the “best” product, what incentive would there be to use anything else? Please note best in quotes as it’s a subjective measure. Thanks!