Tech support isn’t a job for the faint of heart, but some tickets are far easier to navigate than others. And when it’s a company wide bug? Well, thoughts and prayers to the Tech Gods may be in order…

How would you handle getting tossed the brunt of a massive tech issue at work? One guy recently shared a wild story from his own experience with Reddit. Here’s what he said.

The tale of No Auth Monday

I traded my job in the hosting sector for something slightly less… soul sucking in public sector IT.

And as many organizations do these days, we rely heavily on Microsoft for a lot of things.

And that sets the stage for today’s tale of horror.

A sentence surely many people can relate to.

It started simple enough.

A few calls from remote workers unable to authenticate into Citrix using Microsoft Authenticator.

Annoying, sure, but not exactly catastrophic.

Seems to be a common issue across different fields.

We’ve been having enough issues with Microsoft lately that we actually have a backup MFA method for this exact scenario.

So the affected users log in through the backup, we log the tickets, escalate them to the remote work team, and move on with our day.

Slack starts filling with the usual Microsoft memes.

A great way to boost morale.

Business as usual.

Or so we thought.

Suddenly systems start dropping like flies.

Sounds like the start of a horror movie.

First Teams starts screaming that we have no network connection.

Which is impressive, considering we work entirely through Citrix.

If the internet was actually dead, our entire remote desktop environment would be gone too.

Hm, that’s an odd factor to the situation.

So clearly something else was happening.

Then the first colleagues finish calls.

Me included.

Something else had to have happened.

End call.

Move cursor to call system.

Click “Done”.

But it wasn’t done…

Nothing.

Click again.

Still nothing.

That’s more than a little alarming.

Okay… That’s not great.

Now we can’t change status anymore.

People start getting stuck in break states, active call states, all kinds of nonsense.

It would almost be funny if it wasn’t so stressful.

Then internal sites relying on Microsoft authentication begin failing one after another.

Shortly after that, external sites stop loading entirely.

At this point everyone starts asking each other: “Wait… are you guys seeing this too?”

At least they’re all on the same page.

Turns out nobody was hallucinating.

Meanwhile management starts mobilizing.

The call queue climbs from 50… to 75… to 100.

Those poor technicians…

Which sucks, but hey, we have a fallback phone system…

And you guessed it, that can only be enabled by going to an external site.

So for the next 45 ish minutes we mostly sit there watching the infrastructure equivalent of a medieval city burning down around us.

At least he got a good metaphor out of it.

Eventually, after a long call with telecom, the fallback system finally comes online.

And at that exact moment, our primary phone system decides it’s healthy again.

Of course it does.

Oh wow, perfect timing!

And here I am now, two hours later.

Still logging tickets. Still telling remote workers: “Yes, we know Microsoft Authenticator is still broken.”

There was no easy way out of this one.

And so Monday passes by.

Now I sit here on the train ride home preparing tonight’s D&D session to recover mentally from the experience, writing this post as a form of therapy.

These types of things are exactly why Garfield hates Mondays. Let’s see if the good working people of Reddit could relate.

One person shared something that would have been useful.

Sarcasm ran rampant.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a teenager who wants to work, but his mom thinks working past 8pm is too late for high school.

Many appreciated the artistry of the post.

But at least the well-deserved kudos were given.

It takes entire Teams to fix a Microsoft error.