Such a select target has led to conjecture about intentional slow down to penalize one of Microsoft’s competitors. However, in a statement on Hacker News today Edgar from the OneDrive team confirmed that the bug was accidental. “Hi everyone, this is Edgar from the OneDrive team. We know that some users may have experienced difficulty accessing OneDrive for Business on Linux. The issue was resolved as of Tue, March 22nd 3pm PST,” he wrote.
‘Not Intentional’
The problem seems to have originated with StaticLoad.aspx, a page that works in the background to pre-fetch resources in Office online apps. According to Edgar, “for Linux it was falling back to a less efficient technique that was causing the issue.” “Rest assured that this was not intentional,” he clarified. “It was an oversight.” Microsoft has disabled the pre-fetching optimization entirely now but has plans to fix and re-implement it in later builds. Though it’s been a long time in coming, it’s great to see the issue getting some attention. It also makes a lot more sense than the intentional sabotage of Linux products. While the company was previously aggressive towards other OS’s that attitude has taken a big shift under CEO Satya Nadella. The company has its own Linux distribution, as well as SQL Server 2016 on Linux. While the company has failed to be punctual this time around, it’s possible that the devs just weren’t aware of the issue. With hope, the anger from the Linux community will spur a more proactive approach in the future.
