Office 365 Monitoring: Exchange Online Outage February 3, 2021

On February 3, 2021  at ~10:45 pm UTC, Microsoft reported an issue that was causing some users in North America to experience issues with Exchange Online.

Many users quickly confirmed they that they weren't experiencing delays but rather emails altogether bouncing as well as error messages claiming service was unavailable.

At 11:30 pm UTC, we've identified that a subset of infrastructure is unable to process requests for users served through North America, which is resulting in a message backlog and causing delivery delays or failures. Essentially, this outage is prolonging the time it takes for email to reach its destination. Therefore, inbound email isn't making it to your inbox and outbound email isn't making it to the recipient.

Microsoft reported, at 12:19 am UTC, that they were working to reroute traffic to alternate systems to provide relief as they continue their investigation.

Shortly after they reported they were continuing to reroute traffic to alternate systems and they were starting to see some relief.

Finally, at ~2:15 am UTC Microsoft reported that we've completed rerouting traffic and have confirmed that impact had been mitigated.

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 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.

Identify the scope of Office 365 service outage impacts and restore workplace productivity with ENow’s Office 365 Monitoring and Reporting solution. Access your free 14-day trial today!