Exchange Online, SharePoint, and Teams Access Delays (Nov. 17, 2021)

On November 17, 2021, at ~4:06 pm UTC, Microsoft communicated via tweet (@MSFT365status) that they were investigating an issue in which users were experiencing access delays for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Teams.

For IT professionals and system admins with Microsoft admin center access, the issue # was MO298798.

This service disruption issue comes just several hours after a minor Microsoft services event earlier in the day which involved user access issues for Microsoft Forms.

Immediate checks of status.office.com at the time showed no information whatsoever as to any changes in the Microsoft 365 Service Health Status.

There were many public responses on Twitter soon after Microsoft's first reporting of this issue, which can be understood as a more significant service disruption compared to the issue from earlier in the day. Some users were indicating that the issue was impacting Outlook and Dynamics as well.

At approximately 05:37 pm UTC, some 90 minutes after first reporting, Microsoft communicated via @MSFT365status that the impacted geo was North America.  They also communicated that the root cause was "a networking configuration issue" which impacted Microsoft 365 and Azure services.  Lastly, and more importantly, Microsoft confirmed that they corrected the issue (but gave no information as to how they corrected the issue) and that the matter was now resolved.

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.

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!