Goodness, why for the sake of anything, are Microsoft websites so...... AGH!

Posted by TxTechnician@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 24 comments

[https://imgur.com/a/k8zVnNB](https://imgur.com/a/k8zVnNB) Go to post a question, get a spinning death loop of "Loading". I'm on a bunch of tech forums and professional websites. They will have their occasional problems. But it's every other week I have a problem with a Microsoft website. Especially in their admin sites. ie Microsoft 365... Something wont load, or will load dynamically and it always happens right as I'm about to click a button.... And I end up clicking the wrong thing.

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24 Comments

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anxiousinfotech@reddit

I admin Azure Front Door more than I like to. Some of the configs have a god-awful level of redirects and rewrites to keep legacy crap operational, or to ensure legacy crap that no longer exists still has stale URLs sent to an appropriate destination. Much of what Microsoft is running is handled by Azure Front Door and I'm sure various other back end services for more intensive redirects & rewrites (because Front Door is crap for complex scenarios). A LOT of the fuckery I encounter on Microsoft websites where things get stuck loading, or seem to endlessly redirect and/or reload, is the same stuff I see when we screw up our config and/or an origin is changed in a way Front Door is not set to handle...or possibly the changes weren't coordinated properly so you're hitting a region that doesn't have a valid config replicated to it yet. We're using Front Door as a crutch to cobble together legacy crap and keep it working despite the published domain names and paths not remotely matching what's actually on the origin servers. I would be willing to bet anything that Microsoft is doing the same at a much larger scale. They're doing it with a product not remotely capable of handling the job properly and teams that don't properly communicate changes to each other.

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TxTechnician@reddit (OP)

I'm amazed at SharePoint. I've had to refer back to SP 2013 docs to learn about modern day online SharePoint. So much of our modern tech is cobbled together. At times it feels hacky.

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anxiousinfotech@reddit

Oh it absolutely is. You think Teams is a new cloud-first platform? It's Live Communication Server 2005 --> Office Communication Server 2007 --> Lync 2010 --> Lync 2013 -->Skype for Business 2015 --> hacked up the code into Azure container services running over HTTPS --> Hey we built Teams all-new from the ground up for the cloud! No no no, those aren't the same bugs you've experienced since Lync 2010! They're...uhhh...totally unrelated...

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paul_33@reddit

New Teams was fast and responsive for about 5 minutes. Now it's back to being a bloated mess

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Trelfar@reddit

Correct, it was fast and responsive when it didn't have feature parity. As soon as they added back all the things that were missing... treacle.

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CodeBlackVault@reddit

Teams has been hacked quite a bit lately

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SevaraB@reddit

Because sites like these are specifically built to maximize telemetry collection, not to minimize data transfer. Hit F12 and watch the XHRs to UX monitoring platforms like QuantumMetric or Qualtrics just keep going, and going, and going…

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SilverseeLives@reddit

Have you considered that your content blocker might be the cause of this? I disable Adguard when working in my MS365 tenant because I have found it causes exactly this behavior.

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ISeeTheFnords@reddit

Have you tried running sfc /scannow?

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cirquefan@reddit

Pfft As if that will do any good without dism /online /cleanupimage /restore health first

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tuommy@reddit

My biggest complaint with MS support pages is that one paragraph has 5 links to other articles that have paragraphs with more links to other articles.

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RCTID1975@reddit

That's how wikis work....

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muzzman32@reddit

Well.. if the Wiki had links that actually worked or had information that was updated less than 10 years ago, then perhaps.

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FederalDish5@reddit

Please use sfc /scannow

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fedexmess@reddit

And perform a clean boot

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aes_gcm@reddit

Forums have been around for 25 years, this shouldn't be a hard thing to do, and yet here we are. They'd probably have more luck hosting it with phpBB or something.

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professionalcynic909@reddit

Intune has been a real bitch lately.

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travelingjay@reddit

Check out CIPP

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CFH75@reddit

Which browser are you using? When's the lasttime you cleared your cache?

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TxTechnician@reddit (OP)

All in good jest: Here's the classic "trope" troubleshooting response that was widely used (and frequently mocked) on Microsoft's Tech Support forums: >

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WhyDoIWorkInIT@reddit

Because they test changes in production. Have you ever had to deal with their support? I believe that level of incompetence extends to the entire organization

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TxTechnician@reddit (OP)

Oh dude. I had a problem with Power Automate (the new version when they made the new editor) and submitted a ticket. Like 2 months later I get a call from someone who has a bad phone connection. From someone who had a heavy accent. I had them call back because I couldn't hear them. Same problem. Then I got transferred to another person because "technical difficulties". They wasted about 30 minutes of my time. I finally just told them to not worry about the problem. I was willing to help them troubleshoot the new editor.... but they didn't make it easy so. I've had other calls with them that went smooth. But I've had more bad calls than good ones.

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TxTechnician@reddit (OP)

UblockOrigin's under utilized feature of "cosmetic filtering" to the rescue: https://preview.redd.it/qhge1fw1d9re1.png?width=1895&format=png&auto=webp&s=afb9a0aeaa939b4c53d96187dc1398d62dc9a6d9 That pic is with the cosmetic filter off, turn it on the death loop goes away.

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testednation@reddit

Microsoft can't answer that either. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4QRWa68MtLc&pp=ygUbc3VyYWZ2ZSB0YWJsZXQgZGVtbyBjcmFzaGVz