Microsoft 365 File Access Issue, Nov. 2, 2021

On November 2, 2021, at ~11:44 am UTC, Microsoft communicated via tweet (@MSFT365status) that they were investigating an issue involving users not being able to access files within Microsoft 365.

If you had access to the Microsoft admin center, the issue reference # was MO295728.

Responses from the public on Twitter suggested the geo impacts were at least North America, the UK, and other parts of Europe. Also, it appeared from public feedback that the only Microsoft file type impacted may have been Excel files, stored on the SharePoint Online, OneDrive, Office, and Microsoft Teams cloud storage services. At this time, Microsoft and much of the IT community were actively engaged in Day 1 of Microsoft's Ignite.

Within an hour after their first report, Microsoft communicated that a root cause was isolated (but no disclosure as to precise information on the root cause) and, more importantly, that mitigation efforts were underway.

User responses on Twitter were minimal, with the few public responses at this time mainly confirming issue resolution. By 1:11 pm UTC, Microsoft sent out a final message confirming that the matter was resolved.

Additional checks of status.office.com during this time showed no additional information as to the outage.

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!