Office 365 Monitoring: Exchange and Outlook Outage (May 26, 2021)

On May 26, 2021, at ~6:31 am UTC, Microsoft stated they were investigating an Exchange Online issue in which users were unable to forward email.  However, the exact geos impacted were not immediately confirmed and Microsoft suggested that the impact could be for any user of Exchange Online.

Approximately 2 hours later, Microsoft indicated that a recently deployed spam rule was causing the issue and that fixes were underway.

At ~10:09 am UTC, Microsoft indicated that the issue had been resolved.

Later that very same day, at ~5:20 pm UTC, Microsoft reported that they were investigating another separate issue in which email was being sent to the junk folder.

Approximately an hour later, Microsoft indicated that a recent change was being reverted in an effort to resolve the issue.

And not long after that, Microsoft announced that the reversion was complete and that successful email delivery was being observed.

At ~1:56 am UTC on May 27, 2021, Microsoft reported that reprocessing of emails was continuing and would take a few more hours to complete.

At ~6:25 pm UTC, some 24 hours after first reporting the issue, Microsoft was finally about to confirm that the matter was fully resolved, with all emails being reprocessed.

Here are resources for Microsoft Teams monitoring and reporting during service outages.

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!