Microsoft Customers Unable to Send/Receive Emails During Exchange Online Outage

Earlier this week, on Tuesday, July 18th, at approximately 4:47 AM EST, Microsoft communicated via @MSFT365status that they were looking into a service incident issue in which "some" users may have been unable to send Exchange Online emails.   In this initial tweet, Microsoft was very quick with specifics as to the cause: a recent change to its free/busy infrastructure.

As with all of Microsoft's service incident communications via tweet, system admins and IT professionals were directed to reference incident EX649175 in the Microsoft Admin Center for expanded details and additional information as to this issue.

We're investigating an issue where some users may be unable to send Exchange Online email messages due to a recent change to the free/busy infrastructure. We're identifying a plan to resolve the impact. Further details can be found under EX649175 in the admin center.

— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) July 18, 2023

There were no clear disclosures from Microsoft as to the geographic impact, but community responses on Twitter claimed service issues for the U.S., UK, India, Switzerland, Japan, and Italy.  Other community responses on Twitter also voiced frustration over the crippling effects on business operations that this Microsoft service issue was causing, with some system admins claiming that most if not all of their users were unable to send and receive emails during the outage.

Microsoft's second tweet to the community, at 6:39 AM EST, was also their last tweet as to service incident EX649175.  Microsoft was confidently announcing at this time that they had "mitigated impact".  They also implied that impact was not widespread from the start since the free/busy infrastructure change was only to a limited portion of their Exchange infra.

We've mitigated impact for EX649175. Please refer to the admin centre for more details. As the change was only applied to a limited portion of Exchange infrastructure, we've now scoped down our communication to only the customers who were affected by this issue.

— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) July 18, 2023

Despite this second and final message from Microsoft announcing that the matter was resolved, responses on Twitter from the Microsoft community gave the appearance of a much broader impact on the Exchange customer base, with claims from some that the issue was still not resolved.

Microsoft last experienced an outage just 3 weeks ago, on back-to-back days, June 27th and June 28th, where there were significant Microsoft 365 service issues for Outlook and Teams.

Microsoft 365 Monitoring with ENow

This is another instance that underscores the importance of Microsoft 365 monitoring from an end-user experience point of view in order to understand how organizations are impacted during vendor outages. This degree of vagueness leaves administrators wondering what is working and what is not working for employees within their organization. Is Outlook, Outlook mobile, or Outlook on the web having an issue or is it EWS?

With ENow’s Microsoft 365 Monitoring & Reporting Solution, IT Pros are able to go visually monitor their entire environment from a single pane of glass. When an outage occurs, the visual breadcrumb trail enables IT Pros to pinpoint the root cause with confidence.

When an outage does occur, IT Pros can take the guesswork out of the impact and are able to see which services and subset of services are affected with ENow’s remote probes. The end-user experience monitoring probes can be installed where your end users are and cover a wide range of Microsoft 365 apps and other cloud-based collaboration systems (OneDrive, Teams, Zoom, Salesforce).

Lastly, the ENow dashboard provides visibility into the main places IT Pro’s typically go to learn more about outages, namely the Service-Health-Dashboard and Twitter. Thus, providing a single place to obtain information on service outages.

The Importance of Microsoft 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 Microsoft 365 Monitoring and Reporting solution enables IT Pros to pinpoint the exact services affected and root cause of the issues an organization is experiencing during a service outage by providing:

• The ability to monitor 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 Microsoft 365 apps and other cloud-based collaboration services.

Identify the scope of Microsoft 365 service outage impacts and restore workplace productivity with ENow’s Microsoft 365 Monitoring and Reporting solution. Access your free 14-day trial today!