Microsoft 365 Services Access Issue, Nov. 9, 2021

On November 9, 2021, at ~10:11 am UTC, Microsoft communicated via tweet (@MSFT365status) that they were investigating an issue in which some users may not be able to access some Microsoft 365 services when using Single Sign On (SSO) apps.

If you are an IT pro with Microsoft admin center access, the service incident number was MO297147.

Within the hour, Microsoft tweeted another message indicating that a recent change (no other information was disclosed other than the cryptic "recent change") was the culprit and they were working to revert the change.  Microsoft also confirmed that the impacted geo was specific to users in the central region of North America.

Approximately one hour later, Microsoft tweeted again, this time disclosing a bit more information, albeit not much, as to the cause: a recent routing configuration. Mitigation efforts were continuing at this point.  

Some 2 hours later, at approximately 1:33 pm UTC, Microsoft repeated their previous message that mitigation efforts continued, and that improvements in service were being seen.  Some user responses on Twitter confirmed the service restoration in parts.

Since the first report of this issue, several checks of status.office.com showed no issue information whatsoever as to Microsoft 365 Service Health Status.

At approximately 3:22 pm UTC, Microsoft communicated a final message via @MSFT365status indicating that mitigation efforts were now completed, and the issue was 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!