Troy Jacobson, CPA

Husband, father, son, Karate Purple-Tip, fiscally conservative. DMs are $5 #SaveMinneapolis

[Troy Jacobson, CPA @TheNotTurk]

This is the ideal senator body type. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.

[Staff Sergeant Johnson @Colonel_Myway]

The lights are on, but nobody's home...

[Troy Jacobson, CPA @TheNotTurk]

My father-in-law is a builder. It's difficult to get his attention in a magnificent space because he's lost in wonder. We were at my email inbox together and I asked him what it would cost to build it today. I will never forget his answer...

"We can't, we don't know how."

[Luke Elin @LukeElin]

Lots of hot takes on the Microsoft 365 outage. Here's an engineering one.

To be clear: this is speculation. Microsoft hasn't confirmed a root cause. It's my read of their own updates, from 35 years of building and breaking systems.

What Microsoft has actually said:

• Traffic isn't up. Capacity is down. Servers are failing health checks and dropping out.

• A process that establishes secure connections gets overwhelmed, and servers stop processing requests.

• Servers they bring back fall over again as soon as traffic hits them.

• They're reverting a network config change that lines up with when it started. But changes aren't syncing, and some machines are stuck in a bad state.

• No indication of an attack.

My hypothesis: a metastable failure.

Whatever triggered it may be long gone. The outage is now keeping itself alive.

1. Reconnect storm. Every Outlook, Teams and mobile client on the planet is hammering for a fresh secure connection.

Full TLS handshakes are CPU-heavy, and a freshly rebooted server has a cold session cache.

A server comes up, eats a wall of handshakes, CPU pegs, it fails its health check and gets pulled, and its load lands on the next one. Dominoes.

2. The fix shares fate with the failure. If the rollback travels over the same secure channel that's melting, the cure can't reach the patient.

That's exactly what "changes aren't syncing" sounds like to me.

That's why they're throttling traffic types and rebuilding servers from an older config instead of flipping a switch.

You don't get out of this by finding the bug.

You get out by shedding load, restoring capacity in isolated cells, and letting traffic back in slowly.

Where AI fits (also speculation): not "an AI wrote the bad line". It's velocity. Microsoft flagged several recent config changes as suspects and took hours to find one that correlated.

When the volume of change outpaces the humans who understand each change, finding the culprit gets slow and rollbacks get messy. Automate the shipping faster than you automate the understanding, and this is the bill.

The takeaway for every business: your email, chat, files, identity and security tooling now share one failure domain. Today proved it. Have a way to talk to your team that doesn't live in the same tenant.

Happy to be proven wrong by the post-incident review. And I hope this post ages terribly.

[Troy Jacobson, CPA @TheNotTurk]

@SenSchumer Retire, bitch.

[Troy Jacobson, CPA @TheNotTurk]

@kenklippenstein Do you think you could really handle everything that entails? All the travel and sex? Signing women’s boobs?

[Troy Jacobson, CPA @TheNotTurk]

@BokononsProphet @isaiah_bb It’s the new uptown

[Troy Jacobson, CPA @TheNotTurk]

@isaiah_bb @BokononsProphet They’ve got a green mill and a red lobster on the same block. What else could you need?

[Troy Jacobson, CPA @TheNotTurk]

Closed.

Most popular night club in University of Minnesota college town.

[The Spectator Index @spectatorindex]

BREAKING: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang resigns

[Troy Jacobson, CPA @TheNotTurk]

Omg

[Dr. Abdul El-Sayed @AbdulElSayed]

It’s been 51 years since the Edmund Fitzgerald sank into Lake Superior. Today, we honor the 29 brave souls we lost on that tragic day. May their memory live on.

[Troy Jacobson, CPA @TheNotTurk]

He’s threatening to have more republican fanatics murder dfl politicians.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Emmer cuts a promo on Democrats: "Come January 3, 2027, you will regret ever putting your name on a ballot!"

[Troy Jacobson, CPA @TheNotTurk]

@BokononsProphet They should all go on a permanent hunger strike

[Troy Jacobson, CPA @TheNotTurk]

@CantEverDie I couldn’t understand what Matt was upset about because I thought the guy in the foreground of the picture had his hand over the woman’s mouth.

[Troy Jacobson, CPA @TheNotTurk]

@SusanBruiser They did the meme

[Troy Jacobson, CPA @TheNotTurk]

What is it? Dragons?
No, it’s deer!
Watch out.

[Brandonomics Defender @JohnGregoryJr]

I had an alcoholic coworker who told me if you drink vodka no one can smell it and I was like dude you smell like vodka

[Troy Jacobson, CPA @TheNotTurk]

@Jakeyin612 They’ve got a pill for that last one

[Troy Jacobson, CPA @TheNotTurk]

@yoadri_n Have the frey boys chimed in yet?

[Troy Jacobson, CPA @TheNotTurk]

@Alexander_Avina She’s a fascist

[Troy Jacobson, CPA @TheNotTurk]

Walter Hudson cruising around Minnesota while carrying a concealed handgun:

[gail @gailloveswolves]

Minneapolis but make it on film and blurry

[Troy Jacobson, CPA @TheNotTurk]

@flieldy Republicans, who are currently withholding medicaid and snap benefits to states that didn’t vote republican: it is fascism to retaliate against your political opponents.

[Troy Jacobson, CPA @TheNotTurk]

@HeerJeet Kayfabe until Jeffries and Schumer get seated, then he can safely enact his and millers agenda.