Probably going to illicit some bad responses, but hopefully here, people might see what I am trying to say.
While I am annoyed a "ban" has to come into play for social media, it seems to be the only thing we can do in the short term, but as a person in the IT industry, I do wonder if we are missing doing an RCA on the issue.
Even as an adult with a child, I can't see us ever letting our kid actually use social media till they understand it, and that comes down to parenting properly, teaching them the right way, and letting them know of the dangers.
However, I see the root cause as these are commercial platforms which enable the person with more money to throw their version of events at all of us, not just kids and adults. I can see that it isn't just the kids we have to worry about, but we have adults in high places who will believe the same thing, and while we worry about the children in this, there are adults who could do serious damage to themselves and others, and people would look the other way.
These days, people need to have different ways to talk to each other. Yes, I know we used to have letters, then telegrams, then everything evolves, but live changes, and information is so much more freely available. Locking people out of good information means that you are essentially stopping them from seeing the wider picture. Moving closer to sensorship.
For me, its frustrating that this the direction we are going in, but it doesn't actually solve the issue. It just passes it along to later on, further time away, for it to then cause more damage later on. How many times have we as IT people left something and had to then deal with the issues later on.
Social media is just that, it isn't good. I try to stay away from it, but in a way it is the only way I do get updates on what happens to my friends, globally. The world is changing, and we need to adapt, but we need to put the right guardrails in the right place.
Personally, I think the blanket ban is not the right thing to do, but in the short term, we have ended up being the only option we can do, and that isn't good. That is why for me, a ban isn't good. It isn't because I don't think it will help, I just believe it doesn't solve the problem itself.
> I can't see us ever letting our kid actually use social media till they understand it
The social pressure to get on those platforms grows rapidly, well before they are 16. It starts with group chats, and who wants to be left out, where kids start posting funny things from tiktok or whatever, and then it's game over.
We kept ours a bit tight: first phone at 12, no internet, but everyone in the vicinity had whatsapp. Not much later we succumbed. Recently, my daughter told me she felt isolated, because the other kids in her class had access to much more. And that's 12 years ago. I cannot image the current levels of pressure.
Regulation is the only way. Meta, ByteDance, etc. are only moving forward with ever more addictive patterns. And it's killing society.
Edit: I recently was in a conversation with young parents, and one of them said: I do hope there's a ban soon.
Exactly this, the pressure from everyone, not just the kids themselves, is a lot. We are in a digital world right now, and without "digital access", you become part of the crowd that can get bullied for not being up to date. It is a terrible place to be, and you get torn between the two ends of the scale.
I think there is such an issue with closed platforms as well on top of it all. I wouldn't want my kid on WhatsApp being perfectly honestly, I can't really control to a level where I feel that they would be safe on that platform. While all the adults in her life are on there, means we are limited to the odd platform here and there.
I have an Apple device for her, I have used Apple Configurator and profiles to properly lock down what they can do on the device. Even then its timed and monitored, but then we hit the issue. Half the family are Apple, half the family are Android, and same with her friends too. The only way we have been able to get some semblance of chat is Google Meets, but even then messaging doesn't always work, and she is left with SMS, which for some of the other kids, they don't have a SIM in their device (and probably for good reason). It means that keeping the links up between her and everyone is just like being in an IT support department! But at least I know she isn't going to get to anything bad.
Even at school you hear what the other kids have seen, to a point where the school had to pull in Safegarding because one of their kids basically had unfettered access to YouTube, and started telling the class everything.
The ban needs to happen, because we have set ourselves up for this globally, without the right pressure to the right places, to the platforms themselves, the world has to take other actions, and the pressure continues.
It's always the way that we always wish for the things we can't have, as children I remember my own meltdowns back in the day, over Lego of all things!
It isn't good, at all.
Again, I didn't want my post to say I disagree, its just, there needs to be more done, and this is just a plaster over the issue.. it will help, but over time it will become less and less effective :(
> Locking people out of good information means that you are essentially stopping them from seeing the wider picture.
Good information is impossible to define, not least because it's different for every person. There is no single wider picture, certainly not one any two people could agree on and certain not one that can be legislated.
> Moving closer to sensorship.
Censorship for children is an absolute and unabated good. We should be censoring what children can see. We already do in other forms of media and communications.
> For me, its frustrating that this the direction we are going in, but it doesn't actually solve the issue. It just passes it along to later on, further time away, for it to then cause more damage later on.
No, unfettered access to obscene, extreme, & traumatising information, and unfiltered communication with a globe's worth of predators, is orders of magnitude more damaging to children than to adults. Delayed access until both biological and psychological processes mature dramatically reduces overall harm and introduces no new harm.
Fair point on the good information; it is always relative to the person.
What I do want to say is that with the unfettered access side, I completely agree with this too. Right now, because of what has happened, it is the only real option we do have, and it does mean that the wrong things get caught in the collateral. Its frustrating when it does, but if its the right thing to do, then it should be. My point was that while we are putting effort into ensuring people are safe, we need to also put effort into sorting the root cause of the problem too, we can't just ignore it. It will fester and continue, so that when that access is lifted because "they are old enough" then whats stopping it happening then, when they are older.
Just wanted to say I don't disagree with what is happening, I just wish there was more work to help with the root of the problem, to start to actually deal with it further down the rabbit hole.
As we have seen with adult verification too, its a cat and mouse game, and right now, the mice are winning.
I do agree that any ban is of limited future utility if kids go from a safe kiddie pool into deep waters that are lethal for a majority of the population.
Still, dismissing a ban is throwing the baby out with the bath water. (I couldn't help myself with the water analogies. Sorry)
Free speech is the cornerstone of our ability to debate and understand the shape of reality. It remains the best way forward. The issue is that the modern attacks on the market place of ideas are designed to circumvent our intuitions and safeguards.
Today control is achieved by overwhelming the network and users. An Abundance of privately generated content instead of central regulation and restriction of content.
However the threat is the same- reducing the ability for humans to engage in fair debate.
If you want a better environment for kids to be able to transition to, we need to triage.
1) Ensure an even playing field. This means regulation, which by nature will be censorial, as well as the creation of independently funded news and information bodies.
2) Transparency and Data from tech firms. When we find out a substance is harmful, and have the data to prove it, we make rules to mitigate those harms.
3) Valuing informational health and hygene. Junk food used to be dominant globally, and today we joke about avocado toast and the latest health food fad. People shifted consumption habits when costs and benefits were made clear.
100% agreed that at least short term, we should ban it for children.
But beyond..? If we believe in freedom of speech, what's the angle? How is it different from an awful tabloid pushing its own warped reality on us? Colorful "newspapers" with topless models and stories about a stoned postman were also ragebait and dopamine hacking, only offline. I don't like them, but then some time around 18th century we concluded we let almost everyone say almost anything, to make sure no tyrant can shut down ideas singlehandedly.
IMHO the fundamental issue is a failure of education. We're in a position where people (adults) are literally too stupid to tell how bad, deceitful and dangerous this stuff can be. We should teach people properly, then let them read whatever.
Banning cigarettes is one thing, banning (awful but bon-criminal) free speech feels off.
Social media are detrimental for a young human being under development. A child's brain works in no way the same as our adult brains, so we cannot apply the same caring logic as you would with adults. I see this in the same category as cigarettes, drugs and alcohol.
Until you are old enough and we can assume (or hope) there is mental capacity to properly contextualize life choices and being able take a stance for / against these things, a ban is appropriate.
> Even as an adult with a child, I can't see us ever letting our kid actually use social media till they understand it, and that comes down to parenting properly, teaching them the right way, and letting them know of the dangers
Just answering to this part explicitly: Proper parenting is not doable in a lot of modern societies. There are so many children being neglected by their parents. So we'd have to go for a mix of parenting and regulating.
I agree, it needs to be in collaboration though. We can't rely just on one side to do all the work. It has to be a very good balance otherwise it will feel like we are pushing to hard, or being turned into a nanny state.
I agree, it isn't possible to keep up these days on everything. I know for myself, I have my kid with a phone, but I also happen to use Apple Configurator and provide a massively locked down platform for her. It contains enough for her to call us, emergency contacts, a few very selected games, and fully restricted, and monitored. But this I know is only because I am in the IT world, and do this sort of stuff generally. For general parent #1, they will always struggle, so need the support.
Either way, I do agree with you, it needs a mix, a balance, but we also need to use that regulation to hit the source, not plaster over it!
I agree with you on a few key points. Social media is structurally harmful, it amplifies those with money and reach, and good parenting and education are important. Where I disagree is in thinking that “good parents” and awareness are enough; you sound like you’re doing the right thing for your own kids, but that’s the exception, not the norm, and many parents are themselves oblivious to how these products work, so legal guardrails are needed in the same way we regulate alcohol or cigarettes.
If anything, a 16+ cutoff is still quite conservative. These platforms deliberately target developing reward systems and social comparison in the brain, and there is growing evidence (summarized well in the book “The Anxious Generation”) that the risk profile changes meaningfully only in the late teens, so pushing first exposure from 11–13 to 16 gives kids a better chance of resisting those algorithms.
Banning under‑16s from highly optimised, social feeds is also not the same as stopping them from talking to each other; you can still have calls, SMS, WhatsApp, group chats, email and offline social life. In my own case I’ve been social‑media‑free for about four years while still talking to friends and family regularly through these channels.
As someone who grew up all over the world and never stayed in one country for more than five years, I’m 35 and still in touch with close friends around the world purely through direct communication, which has also made it obvious how distorted social media’s notion of “friends” is. Once you leave, you quickly see who actually reciprocates effort instead of passively consuming a curated feed of your life.
You are right that bans don’t fix the deeper structural issues of commercial platforms or information asymmetries, but that’s not an argument against shielding children while we work on those deeper problems. In practice, a simple, blanket rule is often the only thing enforceable at scale that doesn’t depend on every parent being highly technically and psychologically literate.
In that sense, an under‑16 ban is not perfect and does not “solve the problem itself,” but it is still the right move compared to the current situation of throwing undeveloped brains into systems explicitly tuned to hijack their focus. The consequences of which we are only beginning to see now... the issue is tremendous.
Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC, we began experiencing Azure Front Door issues resulting in a loss of availability of some services. In addition. customers may experience issues accessing the Azure Portal. Customers can attempt to use programmatic methods (PowerShell, CLI, etc.) to access/utilize resources if they are unable to access the portal directly. We have failed the portal away from Azure Front Door (AFD) to attempt to mitigate the portal access issues and are continuing to assess the situation.
We are actively assessing failover options of internal services from our AFD infrastructure. Our investigation into the contributing factors and additional recovery workstreams continues. More information will be provided within 60 minutes or sooner.
This message was last updated at 16:57 UTC on 29 October 2025
---
Update: 16:35 UTC:
Azure Portal Access Issues
Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC, we began experiencing DNS issues resulting in availability degradation of some services. Customers may experience issues accessing the Azure Portal. We have taken action that is expected to address the portal access issues here shortly. We are actively investigating the underlying issue and additional mitigation actions. More information will be provided within 60 minutes or sooner.
This message was last updated at 16:35 UTC on 29 October 2025
---
Azure Portal Access Issues
We are investigating an issue with the Azure Portal where customers may be experiencing issues accessing the portal. More information will be provided shortly.
This message was last updated at 16:18 UTC on 29 October 2025
Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC, we began experiencing Azure Front Door issues resulting in a loss of availability of some services. We suspect that an inadvertent configuration change as the trigger event for this issue. We are taking two concurrent actions where we are blocking all changes to the AFD services and at the same time rolling back to our last known good state.
We have failed the portal away from Azure Front Door (AFD) to mitigate the portal access issues. Customers should be able to access the Azure management portal directly.
We do not have an ETA for when the rollback will be completed, but we will update this communication within 30 minutes or when we have an update.
This message was last updated at 17:17 UTC on 29 October 2025
"We have initiated the deployment of our 'last known good' configuration. This is expected to be fully deployed in about 30 minutes from which point customers will start to see initial signs of recovery. Once this is completed, the next stage is to start to recover nodes while we route traffic through these healthy nodes."
"This message was last updated at 18:11 UTC on 29 October 2025"
At this stage, we anticipate full mitigation within the next four hours as we continue to recover nodes. This means we expect recovery to happen by 23:20 UTC on 29 October 2025. We will provide another update on our progress within two hours, or sooner if warranted.
This message was last updated at 19:57 UTC on 29 October 2025
I think we weren't paying for support and it was standard Business Support they were pitching. At the time we were having pretty fundamental problems with Azure Single Server Postgres which was really just a terribly engineered solution which they admitted had some nasty issues (there was some bug that would cause the storage IO threads to deadlock causing Postgres to crash)
in many cases: no service health alerts, no status page updates and no confirmations from the support team in tickets.
still we can confirm these issues from different customers accross europe. Mostly the issues are regional dependent.
Where do these alerts supposedly come from? I started having issues around 4PM (GMT), couldn't access portal, and couldn't make AKV requests from the CLI, and initially asked our Ops guys but with no info and a vague "There may be issues with Portal" on their status page, that was me done for the day.
This is the single most frustrating thing about these incidents. As you're harmstrung on what you can do or how you can react until Microsoft officially acknowledges a problem. Took nearly 90mins both today and when it happened on 9th October.
It's pretty unlikely. AWS published a public 'RCA' https://aws.amazon.com/message/101925/. A race condition in a DNS 'record allocator' causing all DNS records for DDB to be wiped out.
I'm simplifying a bit, but I don't think it's likely that Azure has a similar race condition wiping out DNS records on _one_ system than then propagates to all others. The similarity might just end at "it was DNS".
That RCA was fun. A distributed system with members that don't know about each other, don't bother with leader elections, and basically all stomp all over each other updating the records. It "worked fine" until one of the members had slightly increased latency and everything cascade-failed down from there. I'm sure there was missing (internal) context but it did not sound like a well-architected system at all.
THIS is the real deal. Some say it's always DNS but many times it's some routing fuckup with BGP. two most cursed 3 letter acronym technologies out there
Whilst the status message acknowledge's the issue with Front Door (AFD), it seems as though the rest of the actions are about how to get Portal/internal services working without relying on AFD. For those of us using Front Door does that mean we're in for a long haul?
They briefly had a statement about using Traffic Manager to work with your AFD to work around this issue, with a link to learn.microsoft.com/...traffic-manager, and the link didn't work. Due to the same issue affecting everyone right now.
They quickly updated the message to REMOVE the link. Comical at this point.
Yeah, I am guessing it's just a placeholder till they get more info. I thought I saw somewhere that internally within Microsoft it's seen as a "Sev 1" with "all hands on deck" - Annoyingly I can't remember where I saw it, so if someone spots it before I do, please credit that person :D
It's a Sev 0 actually (as one would expect - this isn't a big secret). I was on the engineering bridge call earlier for a bit.
The Azure service I work on was minimally impacted (our customer facing dashboard could not load, but APIs and data layer were not impacted) but we found a workaround.
yea I saw that, but im not sure on how accurate that is. a few large apps/companies I know to be 100% on AWS in us-east-1 are cranking along just fine.
We already had to do it for large files served from Blob Storage since they would cap out at 2MB/s when not in cache of the nearest PoP. If you’ve ever experienced slow Windows Store or Xbox downloads it’s probably the same problem.
I had a support ticket open for months about this and in the end the agent said “this is to be expected and we don’t plan on doing anything about it”.
We’ve moved to Cloudflare and not only is the performance great, but it costs less.
Only thing I need to move off Front Door is a static website for our docs served from Blob Storage, this incident will make us do it sooner rather than later.
we are considering the same but because our website uses APEX domain we would need to move all DNS resolver to cloudfront right ? Does it have as a nice "rule set builder" as azure ?
Unless you pay for CloudFlare’s Enterpise plan, you’re required to have them host your DNS zone, you can use a different registrar as long as you just point your NS records to Cloudflare.
Be aware that if you’re using Azure as your registrar, it’s (probably still) impossible to change your NS records to point to CloudFlare’s DNS server, at least it was for me about 6 months ago.
This also makes it impossible to transfer your domain to them either, as CloudFlare’s domain transfer flow requires you set your NS records to point to them before their interface shows a transfer option.
In our case we had to transfer to a different registrar, we used Namecheap.
However, transferring a domain from Azure was also a nightmare. Their UI doesn’t have any kind of transfer option, I eventually found an obscure document (not on their Learn website) which had an az command which would let you get a transfer code which I could give to Namecheap.
Then I had to wait over a week for the transfer timeout to occur because there is no way on Azure side that I could find to accept the transfer immediately.
I found CloudFlare’s way of building rules quite easy to use, different from Front Door but I’m not doing anything more complex than some redirects and reverse proxying.
I will say that Cloudflare’s UI is super fast, with Front Door I always found it painfully slow when trying to do any kind of configuration.
Cloudflare also doesn’t have the problem that Front Door has where it requires a manual process every 6 months or so to renew the APEX certificate.
Thanks :). We don't use Azure as our registrar. It seems I'll have to plan for this then, we also had another issue, AFD has a hard 500ms tls handshake timeout (doesn't matter how much you put on the origin timeout settings) which means if our server was slow for some reason we would get 504 origin timeout.
Starting at approximately 16:00 UTC, we began experiencing DNS issues resulting in availability degradation of some services. Customers may experience issues accessing the Azure Portal. We have taken action that is expected to address the portal access issues here shortly. We are actively investigating the underlying issue and additional mitigation actions. More information will be provided within 60 minutes or sooner.
This message was last updated at 16:35 UTC on 29 October 2025
----
Azure Portal Access Issues
We are investigating an issue with the Azure Portal where customers may be experiencing issues accessing the portal. More information will be provided shortly.
This message was last updated at 16:18 UTC on 29 October 2025
I'd say, people that need it. Which could be the same for all the other models out there.
To create one model that is great at everything is probably a pipedream. Much like creating a multi-tool that can do everything- but can it? I wouldn't trust a multi-tool to take a wheel nut off a wheel, but I would find it useful if I suddenly needed a cross-head screw taken out of something.
But then I also have a specific crosshead screwdriver that is good at just taking out cross-head screws.
Use the right tool for the right reason. In this case, there maybe a legal reason why someone might need to use it. It might be that this version of a model can create something better that another model can't. It might be that for cost reasons you are within AWS, that it makes sense to use a model at the cheaper cost than say something else.
So yeah, I am sure it will be great for some people, and terrible for others... just the way things go!
> Do you still have to quit and restart the entire application after you give the permission?
The funny thing about this, even on Sonoma - I could click the button to allow it, when it said "restart app" I closed the box (or clicked cancel), and it worked anyway. Specifically, I noticed it more on things like Teams/Zoom where I was doing a screen share, it just "worked" - no need to restart the entire application.
Refreshed before typing this because I realised someone might have beaten me to it! - But that's a big difference here - even though the service is gone, you got the refund and still a usable device as a controller out of it...
Spotify has taken something that could be used generically too, and just decided to brick it.
Insert something about product and consumers and how its all just some big money game or something somewhere :D
Uniqlo has something similar to this - they use RFID's on their stock so you can dump it into a bucket at the self-checkout, and it scans everything immediately [1]. You still have someone pop over to check if you are OK, but it is a lot quicker than self-scan or usually waiting for someone.
Oddly enough, I am in the UK - and I do have it, but it was already turned off when I went there. I wonder if things have changed, or there are some canary releases of the box... or am I just completely unaware my account isn't considered a UK-based account?
I did a few things in my younger days - I used to like playing MUDs, and one day a few of my college friends wanted to create our own. So we created a fairly unknown MUD called "Faereal" which still happens to be used as my domain name for my personal stuff!
I was lucky enough to have a good friend and neighbour down the road who ran ExNet [1], who provided me with space to host my first server, and oh boy looking back, I am surprised I didn't blow everything up! [2] - Windows 98 connected directly into the internet, with a fairly terrible firewall and some random remote control software I found!.
Eventually, though another MUD, we were donated a more up-to-date box, which ran Linux, and we hosted that MUD and the Faereal MUD for a while, eventually adding in my own DNS server, website hosting (PHP), and that is how I ended up hosting friends websites.
That turned into a hobby where I started to write my own PHP, started helping firstly helping out on a game called "PhaseOne" which was essentially a copy of a game we were all playing at the time called "Planetarion" [3] -- (OMG As I looked for this, its still running!). Part of this code I created a "Team based chat area", which eventually became the primary base for something that has taken over nearly 20 years of my life.
The code became the custom-written forum code behind DDR:UK, a Dance Dance Revolution fan website for the UK, which through the founders we created the "official" Sim Packs for DDR simulators such as DWI [4] and Stepmania [5]. This eventually moved into us working at events such as the London MCM ComicCon [6], where we bought in actual DDR arcade machines, including a Stepmania run DDR Machine that used to sit in the Namco Station in Central London on the South Bank. (I would love to say it was a world first, but there was one group in the US that had a temporary setup... I would like to hope we are the world first permanent money-making one :D)
That got me into running a Japanese Culture Festival called Tokonatsu [7] which got me into learning AWS. This festival has now been running for 20 years!
So all in all, how did this help:
* Interviews, it's a great story to tell, and I always get a lot of fun looks!
* Experience, from hardware, to networking, to early days of internet, software, hosting etc etc. I went thought a LOT of sleepless nights when I was younger sorting this out, gave me a whole bunch of experience that I would never would have had.
* Networking, still talk to a lot of people today, and these people are key for where I am.
Honestly, the owner of ExNet, I couldn't have done any of this, if he hadn't of started me on the right path.
EDIT: Totally forgot to explain where I am now! So with all this, through support tech, manager of of datacentres, through lead engineers, etc etc... I am now the AWS Practice Lead for my company, a Principle Consultant, and I am writing this in the airport on the way back from AWS Re:Invent 2023 :D
So yeah, that is my story! Hope someone does eventually read it :D
While I am annoyed a "ban" has to come into play for social media, it seems to be the only thing we can do in the short term, but as a person in the IT industry, I do wonder if we are missing doing an RCA on the issue.
Even as an adult with a child, I can't see us ever letting our kid actually use social media till they understand it, and that comes down to parenting properly, teaching them the right way, and letting them know of the dangers.
However, I see the root cause as these are commercial platforms which enable the person with more money to throw their version of events at all of us, not just kids and adults. I can see that it isn't just the kids we have to worry about, but we have adults in high places who will believe the same thing, and while we worry about the children in this, there are adults who could do serious damage to themselves and others, and people would look the other way.
These days, people need to have different ways to talk to each other. Yes, I know we used to have letters, then telegrams, then everything evolves, but live changes, and information is so much more freely available. Locking people out of good information means that you are essentially stopping them from seeing the wider picture. Moving closer to sensorship.
For me, its frustrating that this the direction we are going in, but it doesn't actually solve the issue. It just passes it along to later on, further time away, for it to then cause more damage later on. How many times have we as IT people left something and had to then deal with the issues later on.
Social media is just that, it isn't good. I try to stay away from it, but in a way it is the only way I do get updates on what happens to my friends, globally. The world is changing, and we need to adapt, but we need to put the right guardrails in the right place.
Personally, I think the blanket ban is not the right thing to do, but in the short term, we have ended up being the only option we can do, and that isn't good. That is why for me, a ban isn't good. It isn't because I don't think it will help, I just believe it doesn't solve the problem itself.