Exchange Online Access Issues (Jan. 17, 2022)

On January 17, 2022, at ~02:06 am UTC, Microsoft communicated via tweet (@MSFT365status) that they were investigating an issue in which users were experiencing Exchange Online mailbox and calendar access issues.

For IT professionals and system admins with Microsoft admin center access, the incident # was EX315207.

Social media responses from the public were mild, with most users making comments as to which geo they were located in and whether or not their access was down. 

Within minutes of their initial tweet, Microsoft posted a second message confirming the geo regions impacted: Australia, North America and Japan.  Microsoft also stated that they had disabled a recently enabled "flight" in an effort to mitigate impact.

And by 03:51am UTC, it was all over.  Microsoft tweeted a final message as to issue # EX315207 and stated that they were confirming availability (all?) had been restored.  

A short-lived and minor service interruption it seems, but for any user impacted as well as any IT team responsible for those users, it may not have been a good start to the day.

Subsequent checks of status.office.com later in the day on January 17, 2022, showed no information whatsoever as to any changes in the Microsoft 365 Service Health Status.

The Importance of Office 365 Monitoring

In a cloud-world, outages are bound to happen. While Microsoft is responsible for restoring service during outages, IT needs to take ownership of their environment and user experience. It is crucial to have greater visibility into business impacts during a service outage the moment it happens.

ENow’s Office 365 Monitoring and Reporting solution enables IT Pros to pinpoint the exact services effected and root cause of the issues an organization is experiencing during a service outage by providing:

• The ability to monitor networks and entire environments in one place with ENow’s OneLook dashboard which makes identifying a problem fast and easy without having to scramble through Twitter and the Service Health Dashboard looking for answers.
• A full picture of all services and subset of services affected during an outage with ENow’s remote probes which covers several Office 365 apps and other cloud-based collaboration services.

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