Forgot to Renew Your TLS Certificate, Microsoft?

Microsoft Teams went dark for seven hours yesterday. It turns out the Teams team forgot to renew a TLS certificate.

Teamwork: It means “Someone else will fix it,” apparently. Red faces in Redmond.

But could it happen to you? In today’s SB Blogwatch, we test processes and procedures.

Your humble blogwatcher curated these bloggy bits for your entertainment. Not to mention: random playlist.


If you don’t wanna see Teams

What’s the craic? Tom Warren did a full 180—“Microsoft Teams goes down”:

 Users of Microsoft’s Slack competitor were met with error messages attempting to sign into the service … with the app noting it had failed to establish an HTTPS connection. … “We’ve determined that an authentication certificate has expired causing users to have issues using the service,” explains Microsoft’s outage notification.

This was an embarrassing mistake for Microsoft to make for its flagship “Office hub” software … especially when the company develops software like System Center Operations Manager to monitor for … certificate expiration.

Crazy. Richard Speed’s thinking ’bout the way it was—“Popcorn time”:

 Microsoft’s Slack-for-Suits collaboration platform has decided that Mondays aren’t for it and has gone back to bed. … The postmortem will make for interesting reading.

Did the heartbreak change Ron Miller? Maybe—“Teams has been down”:

 The reason for the problem? An expired certificate, which frankly, has to be pretty embarrassing for the group responsible.

The company is in the midst of a battle with Slack for hearts and minds in the enterprise collaboration space, and a preventable outage has to be awkward for them.

But look at where this Anonymous Coward ended up:

 Oh come on. Microsoft only has 148,000 employees and $120 Billion a year in revenue. How are they supposed to keep track of renewing certificates?

LOL. alpb is all good already:

 Pro-tip: Renew your certs automated every 30 days and set to expire 90 days and set alerts at 35 days.

So ffkom’s so moved on:

 I can say that from my first hand experience, certificate renewal worked just fine when we were a company of 20 to 200 people. But about two years ago, with then several thousand people (and still the same number of certificates) … the one person who was previously responsible for certificate management got laid off to improve profitability.

Ever since, certificate renewal has been a mess and [we] missed the deadline several times.

It’s scary. Ryan Brooke Payne’s not where you left him at all, with these “Features” of Teams:

No Taxonomy
Microsoft Teams ensures that knowledge is NEVER organized. You can’t add tags or categories so knowledge remains in its raw disheveled state.

Useless Search
Hoping to never find a chat from two weeks ago? Look no further. Teams search is purposefully inept. You’ll spend hours digging around for your old communication.

Competitive Chatting
Ever wished you could compete for space in a chat channel? You’re in luck. Adding comments to chat messages bumps the chats to the bottom. Now you can compete with your coworkers over which chat is most visible.

Context Switching
Microsoft Teams is engineered to drastically increase your heart rate and blood pressure. You’ll feel an unconscious drive to respond right away as soon as you see that bright red number increase on your badge icon. You’ll never get meaningful work done again!

If you don’t wanna see mns dancing with somebody:

 We used Slack internally in … IT for a couple of years. … It was decided that we will go with Teams because it’s cheaper/free (we’re already on Office 365 and the Microsoft stack since the beginning) and we were told to kill Slack.

On macOS our conference room equipment crashes Teams (Slack and others have no issues with it), notifications are not native and sometimes they show up, sometimes they don’t. You unplug your headphones, Teams rings, but no one is calling. It crashes both on Windows and Mac for no reason from time to time. Today we had a meeting and half the people could not join because of this issue.

If you wanna believe that anything could stop coofercat:

 If they’d been in AWS, Amazon would have renewed it automatically for them 😉

Meanwhile, MyffyW don’t show up:

 I like Teams. My email inbox has never been so quiet.

And Finally:

Sorry (especially for the Nightcore and Vaporwave versions).

Previously in And Finally


You have been reading SB Blogwatch by Richi Jennings. Richi curates the best bloggy bits, finest forums, and weirdest websites… so you don’t have to. Hate mail may be directed to @RiCHi or [email protected]. Ask your doctor before reading. Your mileage may vary. E&OE.

Image source: Géraldine Le Meur for LeWeb (cc:by)

Richi Jennings

Richi Jennings

Richi Jennings is a foolish independent industry analyst, editor, and content strategist. A former developer and marketer, he’s also written or edited for Computerworld, Microsoft, Cisco, Micro Focus, HashiCorp, Ferris Research, Osterman Research, Orthogonal Thinking, Native Trust, Elgan Media, Petri, Cyren, Agari, Webroot, HP, HPE, NetApp on Forbes and CIO.com. Bizarrely, his ridiculous work has even won awards from the American Society of Business Publication Editors, ABM/Jesse H. Neal, and B2B Magazine.

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