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.
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.
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