Office 365 Monitoring: Microsoft 365 Services Outage (July 29, 2021)

On July 29, 2021, at ~3:35 am UTC, Microsoft announced that they were looking into an issue in which users in Germany potentially could have access issues or degraded experiences for Microsoft 365 services.

The service incident number was MO273940.

Initial retweets and public feedback indicated that the Microsoft 365 outage was not impacting some users but was impacting ALL of Germany with some uncorroborated suggestions that internet provider Deutsche Telekom was part of the root cause.  Approximately one hour after first reporting the issue, Microsoft was advising that a Microsoft network connection to a third-party ISP "was not taking traffic."  Microsoft was at this time taking steps to resolve the issue.  At this time, imminent service restoration seemed promising.

Some Twitter followers soon began commenting that services were being restored.

Approximately two hours after first reporting the issue, Microsoft indicated that their effort to divert user traffic to an alternate channel was mitigating the situation.  There were no further reports from Microsoft (@MSFT365status) regarding the matter.  Once the matter was resolved, some Twitter users thanked Microsoft for resolving the issue, some thanked Deutsche Telekom, and a few others asked for more precise information and disclosures as to the true root cause.  That same day, Deutsche Telekom confirmed the nation-wide internet outage for Germany but, much like Microsoft, had limited information for the public as to the exact and precise root cause.

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!