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Microsoft 365 outage leads to chlorine gas poisoning of 15 hotel guests

69 points DeepLogin 1 hour ago 23 comments

k310 35 minutes ago | parent

https://www1-wdr-de.translate.goog/nrw/rheinland/rhein-erft-...

> 15 guests injured at Phantasialand

> Due to the (Microsoft) disruption, no emails were received, as the company informed WDR on Saturday. As a result, no one was aware that the sauna area's maintenance safety system had already issued an email alert. This was because the automatic dosing system had pumped too much chlorine into the pool.

londons_explore 34 minutes ago | parent

Employee finds pool water has dangerous amounts of chlorine, yet instead of locking the door to the pool they just send an email into the void?

Animats 30 minutes ago | parent

Apparently the alarm system sent its alarms via email.

"As a result, no one was aware that the sauna area's maintenance safety system had already issued an email alert. This was because the automatic dosing system had pumped too much chlorine into the pool."

We're in an era where alarms go out via email, major policy changes are announced on Truth Social, and war is declared on X/Twitter.

ocdtrekkie 30 minutes ago | parent

This is an automated system almost certainly. It monitors the chemistry and sends alerts if things fall out of range.

dgoldstein0 24 minutes ago | parent

Whoever made email safety critical was not thinking... What a dumb design decision

N19PEDL2 25 minutes ago | parent

This is 100% fault of the hotel, not of Microsoft. It’s unacceptable that the communications regarding such a dangerous thing totally rely on email, without any backup or double check.

macNchz 19 minutes ago | parent

Seems like if the system can send an email it should be able to, like, illuminate a red light somewhere or something, if what it’s doing can create an actual safety risk.

freitasm 15 minutes ago | parent

Came here to say this. A push notification to an app or Slack/Discord. Or even a light.

I know the S in IoT means safety/security, but there must be things that can be done for urgent notification.

cbarnes99 14 minutes ago | parent

It's the fault of the company that designed the automatic alarm. Not the hotel. But it is accurate to say that the cause of the issue was the outage.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 5 minutes ago | parent

We can assign fault, or we can ask which levers we can pull to make it better:

1. Can there not just be a light / siren right next to the gas sensors? Easy to fix, but it requires hardware changes on-site.

2. Could Microsoft have not had an outage? Hard to fix.

3. Could they use some better notifications systems like idk self-hosted ntfy.sh with a warning if the server goes down? Yes but nobody wants to pay for that.

discordance 23 minutes ago | parent

I know it’s fun to blame Microsoft for things, but that is a poor and dangerous design.

Anything that could result in that sort of harm should have a more resilient and redundant architecture.

mentalgear 22 minutes ago | parent

Core services must be as minimal and stable as possible, with safe fallbacks and never be part of a huge internet smart device big tech clusterfuck.

dekhn 17 minutes ago | parent

Perhaps as a proximal cause, but not a root cause.

lazzurs 13 minutes ago | parent

For anyone that doesn't read the link they were hurt but seriously.

This was bad system design. Hopefully people learn that safety critical services can't rely on Microsoft which they also tell you not to do.

johnnyApplePRNG 11 minutes ago | parent

Hot take.

lwansbrough 8 minutes ago | parent

I suppose if you really think about it, butterflies are responsible for everything.

userbinator 6 minutes ago | parent

Surprising this happened in Germany of all places; don't they have a huge emphasis on Linux and OSS?