Does anyone have a user with an extreme setup that you don't even know where to start with?

So I have a user that was having Outlook issues, They hit the toggle to go over to New Outlook to see if it would fix it (it did ironically enough) but it wouldn't show all their folders.

They hit me up and asked about it. I saw there was a show more folders button at the bottom of the list and hit it. I get a warning about a 10,000 folder limit, and that if you proceed, it will show all your folders, but in Alphabetical order.


I queried his mailbox and this user had close to 15,000 folders just in their main Inbox. WHY? I don't know.

Mind you this user has Auto Archive turned on for anything older than 2 years so its not like he has a treasure trove of old emails.

So I told him if he wanted to use New Outlook, his folders would have to be in alphabetical order. He then asks if we could schedule a meeting to discuss what that meant. I just swapped him back to Classic and the issue he was apparently having was gone, and he was good.

Eventually, he will have to deal with his monstrosity of a folder structure at some point, but not today, thankfully.


So ya, anyone have a crazy user experience.

https://redd.it/1qk2t49
@r_systemadmin

Microsoft 365 Exchange down?

Cant send or recieve any emails all the sudden are they down?

https://redd.it/1qk3tg7
@r_systemadmin

Today is my first day at Microsoft!

Saw a weird networking config thing in the M365 auth stack.

Think I fixed it.

Rolled it out to production already.

Grabbing lunch quick and will be checking results after!

https://redd.it/1qk66zy
@r_systemadmin

You have to be joking Microsoft

Is the move to full cloud even worth it anymore? These constant outages is making me think I should just stick to my hybrid setup

https://redd.it/1qk710v
@r_systemadmin

Latest MS update: "We're continuing to review what actions are required to restore the affected infrastructure to a heathy sic state and rebalance the service traffic to achieve recovery." -Ruh roh

The kind of thing you say when you have no idea what's going on.

https://redd.it/1qk6mok
@r_systemadmin

I Feel Like Nobody Knows Anything Anymore

I'm a relatively new sysadmin. Been in my current role for a few years, worked my way up from call center helpdesk to desktop support and now here. Even got myself a promotion to a higher grade sysadmin on my team. I'm at a stage in my career where I can generally work independently, but I still do need some mentorship and guidance, especially with niche applications and systems.

There is nobody. I'm expected to fly solo in a world where all the search engines are broken, every application either has or is pretending to have some bullshit LLM thing slapped on top of it, MS's documentation and infrastructure is total garbage, and every learning opportunity is a sales pitch or an outright grift. I spend 60-70% of my day just trying to figure out how to do the simplest things with broken tools. Workarounds piled on top of workarounds.

Couple that with all the outages in the past year, and I feel like I'm in the wrong career. Many days, it just feels like the whole tech world has lost its goddamn mind. Does anybody actually know how to write any software anymore? Does anybody actually know how to wire up a network anymore? Does anybody actually know how to do ANYTHING??

I go to get official MS-developed stuff off Github and find codebases riddled with vibe-coded nonsense, nonsensical documentation full of typos. I try to wrestle Intune into shape, try to get our environment squared away for Win11, and I feel like I'm fighting my tools more than anything else. Nothing works anymore. Nobody knows what they're doing. It's all coming down.

I make good money to do what I do, but man this is a frustrating, extremely stressful career. I feel like I spend all my time in pointless meetings with people who don't know what they're talking about, and there is no higher authority I can appeal to, no-one I can ask for help. Things fall apart and the center cannot hold.

Cheers

https://redd.it/1qk8t77
@r_systemadmin

The "Green Dashboard" is gaslighting my entire department

It’s happening again.

Tickets are flooding in. "Outlook isn't syncing." "Teams messages are failing." My phone is vibrating off the desk.

I check the Microsoft Service Health Dashboard.

There is nothing more infuriating than having to tell 500 panicked users (and my boss) that "Yes, it is broken," while the vendor insists everything is fine. I finally dug up the advisory MO1221364 buried in the admin center, blaming a "third-party networking issue" (classic).

Can we talk about the emotional toll of this? We are the ones on the front lines taking the heat, while the dashboard stays green for 4 hours to protect their SLA credits.

How many of you are currently staring at a "Healthy" dashboard while your infrastructure burns?

https://redd.it/1qk6ywc
@r_systemadmin

Is anyone back up yet?

Microsoft 364 Service Health says they're deploying mitigations and monitoring... but I haven't seen any change yet. Not a single external email is coming in.

Is anyone else getting anything yet?

https://redd.it/1qkahvp
@r_systemadmin

Widespread Connectivity Issues? M365 Admin, Exchange Online PS, and GitHub Actions

Is anyone else seeing major instability across the Microsoft stack right now?

I'm currently experiencing:

* **M365 Admin Center:** Pages are only partially loading or timing out completely.
* **Exchange Online:** Cannot establish a session via PowerShell (`Connect-ExchangeOnline` fails).
* **GitHub Actions:** Significant delays in workflow runs; jobs are queuing for much longer than normal.

It seems like a broader connectivity issue affecting multiple services. I haven't seen an official MO post in the health dashboard yet because the dashboard itself is barely loading.

Can anyone confirm if they are seeing similar behavior?

https://redd.it/1qk5ikc
@r_systemadmin

Don't forget to request SLA compensation for today's 365 outage

Today’s outage, if it affected you, should have lasted long enough to qualify for an SLA payout. Make sure you look up how to submit a claim. It may not be worth the effort if you are a small direct customer, but if you purchase through a VAR or CSP, they should handle most of the process for you. Typically, you will only need to provide specifics that Microsoft requires, such as the start time, end time, and the number of licenses affected.

Microsoft can be inconsistent with the compensation amounts. We have received some significant refunds for past outages, as well as a few that were honestly quite insulting.

https://redd.it/1qkgdv5
@r_systemadmin

They actually labelled them false positive

LMAO! Microsoft had the balls to label the exchange, teams issues today as false positive!

WOW. that's craziness.

https://redd.it/1qkf4zv
@r_systemadmin

Microsoft back online. Excuse: too many servers were shut down during maintenance.

Preliminary root cause:
We identified that the issue was caused by elevated service load resulting from reduced capacity during maintenance for a subset of North America hosted infrastructure.”

For 9 and a half hours? You can’t shift the traffic to another region? You can’t abort the maintenance and turn it back on? This smells fishy….

https://redd.it/1qkjzh1
@r_systemadmin

Weekly 'I made a useful thing' Thread - January 23, 2026

There is a great deal of user-generated content out there, from noscripts and software to tutorials and videos, but we've generally tried to keep that off of the front page due to the volume and as a result of community feedback. There's also a great deal of content out there that violates our advertising/promotion rule, from noscripts and software to tutorials and videos.

We have received a number of requests for exemptions to the rule, and rather than allowing the front page to get consumed, we thought we'd try a weekly thread that allows for that kind of content. We don't have a catchy name for it yet, so please let us know if you have any ideas!

In this thread, feel free to show us your pet project, YouTube videos, blog posts, or whatever else you may have and share it with the community. Commercial advertisements, affiliate links, or links that appear to be monetization-grabs will still be removed.

https://redd.it/1qkmvws
@r_systemadmin

I lost my ssh key for a VPS I own. I'm locked out, aren't I?

I fucked up. I have a VPS that I use a SSH key to access. That ssh key was on my pc. Notice the past tense here. That pc has been formatted and sold about 2 weeks ago.

I obviously did not make a backup because why the fuck would I, that's something only smart people do.

This VPS is hosted by Hetzner if it makes any difference.

This is clearly a long shot but is there any way to access the VPS? I'll write an email to Hetzner telling them how much of a dumbass I am and maybe they can give me a hand since they have physical access to the VPS. Even so I sincerely doubt they'll help...god knows how many instances are on that machine.

https://redd.it/1qkqmb2
@r_systemadmin

Did everybody lose an unknown number of emails from M365 issues?

I sent some test emails during the M365 outage yesterday. The only ones that showed up in my inbox after the problem was resolved were the ones that I sent after the problem was resolved. The ones from earlier in the day never showed up in my M365 inbox and my GMail account never received any rejection.

I may never know exactly how many emails went to the bitbucket yesterday, but I suspect a lot.

Same thing all over?

https://redd.it/1qktxfs
@r_systemadmin

I did not abide.... Read Only Friday

Don't do it, no matter how many times you've done it before, no matter how trivial it typically is.... DON'T DO IT!!

Thought I could sneak a ticketing system upgrade in on a Friday before a few days off. I do not yet know how much of my time I've donated for "this one small thing".....

EDIT:

It was the classic, update blew up the config game. PTO rescued, happy Friday peeps!

https://redd.it/1qkrwp0
@r_systemadmin

Microsoft needs a wake up call

MORE issues with exchange today. "A recent code regression is causing crashes on a portion of mailbox infrastructure that handles access requests from Outlook on the web, New Outlook, Outlook for Mac, and mobile apps".

Get it the fuck together, Microsoft. Jesus christ.

Edit: grammar mistake

https://redd.it/1qkz2te
@r_systemadmin

Alerting Staff

So yesterday sh*t show with MS it was apparent that we need a way to mass communicate with staff that there is an outage in these types of situations in the event Teams or Mail (or both) go down. We currently don't have a company portal for these types of notifications. I'm wondering if anyone has gone down this path, and if so what they did?

https://redd.it/1qkuvkx
@r_systemadmin

It’s the dream on social media vs. reality

Everyone on social media says, "Oh, IT is great, I make $100k+." But unless you live in a high COL area, the reality is usually starting in Help Desk for $30k–$60k. That is often not far off from the regular job postings you might see for retail or delivery/warehouse in the area, just with the advantage that you're working at a desk or remote.


​I want to hear the real journey, not the highlight reel:

​The Start: What level did you start at (MSP, local shop, corporate, family biz, etc.)? What state were you in, what was the pay, and was it actually livable at the time?

​Location: Did you have to move to get better pay, or were you able to advance locally?

​The Work: Was your first job simple, or were you thrown into the fire? How long until you actually felt like you knew what you were doing?

​Education: Did college or certs actually help you in the real world, or were they just a specific checkbox to get hired?

​The Grind: What's the longest you've spent grinding on a single project?

​The Money: How long did you spend in the field before you actually hit $100k?

https://redd.it/1ql62va
@r_systemadmin

Anyone ever sit in a Colo during a severe weather event?

With all the crazy temps and likelihood of widespread power outages across the US, anyone ever look to weather the outage/recharge devices and such at your Colo? Do places usually have policies on this?

I’m north enough where I’ll be fine in this storm but the thought occurred to me!

Edit:

People seem confused by my question, I was referring to the context of charging devices and caching some Netflix on your phone stopping by for a few hours vs living there for 3 days

https://redd.it/1qkwshz
@r_systemadmin

Do you delay Windows updates?

Over the years windows patching has been of highly varying quality, and every conversation I can find around this has a lot of people on two very different sides. I've been trying to puzzle out an answer between "Always patch immediately" and "let someone else be the beta tester".

I don't see any good recent conversations on this topic in this sub in recent years that have swayed me one way or the other, so I'm hoping to get some more opinions here.

https://redd.it/1qlgcc5
@r_systemadmin