What Microsoft Outage??
I switched to Linux permanently four years ago. I had always been an on-again, off-again user of Windows and Microsoft products. That pretty much ended when I made this last switch to Linux. Now I know why.
According to TechCrunch,
"Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot, were interrupted. Downdetector said it received outage reports from users in more than 70 countries and territories. It began with email and chat and then spread. The outage also knocked out the company's Copilot AI tools and Defender security screening software, and prevented system administrators from accessing their internal Intune dashboards and features."
But for people like me who don't use any of those services, let alone Windows, I was oblivious until I started seeing posts across the aggregators I follow to find content I want to read. For us, it's business as usual. +1 for FOSS!
My desktop is Debian 13 running Plasma (Wayland). My office needs are met by LibreOffice, Obsidian, and Okular. I don't use any collaboration tools like Teams, but I have a Zoom account if I ever need something like that. For AI assistants, I use Ollama with various LLMs, and for more demanding work, Claude Code and Codex.
Email is handled in multiple ways. I have my own domains, with email served by Migadu and accessed via Thunderbird or Migadu's webmail interface in the browser. I also use Tuta Mail for some anonymous uses.
Yes, I use Proton Mail. Despite all the nonsense going around about them, Proton has been a solid service for me for close to 10 years now. I don't pay for their politics; I pay for their services. If any of my services has a potential weak spot, that might be it. I rely heavily on Proton Calendar for a LOT of aspects of my life. It's connected to my phone, and losing it would be a blow, but not the end of the world.
I also believe that good security habits do more than an antivirus scanner. I install security updates automatically, use only trusted software sources, use ufw to control ports and access, and keep tight, controlled SSH policies. I have ClamAV installed but have never needed to use it.
The long and short of it is that I'm not relying on some corporation to control my computer, my online life, or my productivity.
There was a Microsoft outage? Who cares?