Welcome to the new world of risk: Microsoft cuts off services to energy company without notice
Welcome to the new world of risk: Microsoft cuts off services to energy company without notice
If software is a service, then service can be denied at any time. Host your own infrastructure, and reclaim digital ownership.
That goes for large businesses and individuals.
My company spent last decade automating moving entire organizations and all their software to the cloud. This decade weve been automating moving entire organizations off the cloud. Sometimes to private clouds but most of the time to on prem hardware just like the old n times.
So many were sold a magical fairytale of huge cost savings and reliability but were greated with an entirely different reality.
I will never understand why businesses want to let someone else control their infrastructure. Putting your money-maker in someone else's hands is just telling them that it's OK to give you the squeeze later.
Whoever decides to trust Microsoft will always get burned. Amazon and Google not much better.
Yep, i've seen this exact pattern at three diffrent companies - the cloud repatriation movement is gaining serious momentum as CFOs finally see the true long-term costs versus the initial promises.
The cloud is often more expensive though.
in house IT got fucking lazy or not funded properly likely both
Yeah, it is very important to consider how dependant you are on third parties. At the very least the more dependence the more power they have over you. But also how screwed you are if they just go under.
The new model is SAAH (Software As A Hostage). You would think that overpaid CTOs and CEOS would be able to anticipate something as obvious as this. "The Cloud" just means "someone else's server".
That cloud marketing was great at give idiots false sense of ownership
Control is never just outsourced; it's also abdicated through that outsourcing.
One extreme defensive move for an enterprise would be to implement full redundancy for anything not hosted on-premises. Redundancy for data protection is relatively straightforward, but having multiple email, supply chain, or e-commerce services is very expensive and disruptive. What are the odds that it would even be needed? Whatever those odds were, they just became much higher.
This is simply dumb. The odds are greater than zero. you must have a disaster plan. It sucks that MS did this but I don’t have much sympathy for anyone that decided to save money by ignoring DR.
Especially a utility of all things.
You'd think russian assets would work harder not to be dependent on US clouds.
Now they're going on a slippery slope. Just what EU needed to convince them entirely.
The EU pushed for Microsoft to lock the account because they were dealing with Russian oil. It was a Ukrain war sanction
Or at least that’s what the article said.
The article isn't really honest btw, it says indian company and very vaguely alludes to sanctions.
Only a link in the article explains that it's a Russian company dealing with Russian oil
Does anybody read the articles anymore or just post titles?
I just read what AI tells me about it. /s
Critical Dependency As A Service
For when you need to outsource the potential crippling of your business to potentially hostile third parties.
Similar to Microsoft cutting off access to the email server at the International Criminal Court. We need to get our shit together.
What happened?
Basically blocked ICC users access to their email and thus ability to do their job. https://nltimes.nl/2025/05/20/microsofts-icc-email-block-triggers-dutch-concerns-dependence-us-tech
Crowdstrike already showed very impressively the danger of monopolies.
Idk I wonder how abrupt this actually was. Russia sanctions have been happening for a while.
I swear to god I keep wondering when people are going to wake up to the fact that Cloud is such a fucking rip off on every level.
Really burying the lead there. They were shut off due to government sanctions, not arbitrarily by Microsoft.
49% owned by Rosneft while another 49% are owned by "UCP" (Russia's United Capital partners). Basically a 100% russian refinery in India...
*burying the lede (it's a term from old press printing)
Most style guides and standards accept either spelling, especially when writing for general audiences.
For strict, formal writing, "lede" is still preferred.
https://getproofed.com.au/writing-tips/idiom-tips-bury-the-lede-or-bury-the-lead/
It's burying the lead. As in, you put metal in the ground.
Really, really dishonest to demonize Microsoft who are in the middle of this. And I say that as someone who hates Microsoft and most of what they do! But this was intentionally painful sanctions decided on by the governments of 27 member countries. 🤷♂️ Don't sell to Russia...
I think the main thing to focus on is govs should realize they need to ditch Windows, cause what's stopping dumbass America (Tr*mp) from filling a sanction against a country he doesn't like that week?
Your framing is inconsistent with the information provided in the story. Actually, I think your version is more deceptive than the original, although both could be made more transparent, too.
Enforcing sanctions is not Microsoft's purview though. Unless their TOS specifically cover rthis scenario, which I doubt.
The article implies Microsoft is prepared to admit breach of contract terms, rather than risk EU distrust (or further distrust, after the Khan/ICC debacle).
It is if they want to operate in the country imposing the sanctions.
"Sorry government, I can't enforce your sanctions, my ToS don't allow me"
Do you really think this works?
Which hits them harder it's always just about the money. They won't stop supporting genocide in other countries so fuck the capitalist pigs.
that should be true, but for some reason, these companies are hiding their glee behind governments as they go above and beyond what the sanctions require.