Microsoft 365 Outage Impacts North American Region

This outage is yet another this quarter. We previously reported on two other major outages in July that ENow’s Monitoring Software alerted our customers to:  

• The Infamous CrowdStrike Outage 
  • On July 18, 2024, a global Microsoft 365 and Azure outage was prompted by a CrowdStrike Falcon agent update, causing significant service disruptions including the “Blue Screen of Death” on machines. The incident affected businesses and airports globally.  

• Global Microsoft 365 and Azure Services outage caused by a DDoS attack
  • Shortly after, July 30, 2024, a Microsoft 365 and Azure outage impacted services globally due to a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. This attack caused performance issues with Azure Front Door and Azure Content Delivery Network, affecting various services, including Azure App Services and Microsoft 365. ENow’s Microsoft 365 Monitoring and Reporting tool identified these problems, showing that Microsoft's Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) network was down. 

M365 Outage on September 12, 2024  

On Wednesday, Microsoft announced on X that the issue was traced to working with a third-party ISP and a change in its management environment impacted its services.   

Figure 1: Update from the Microsoft 365 Status X Account 

How Did ENow's Microsoft 365 Reporting & Monitoring Illuminate this Outage?  

During the outage, ENow’s Microsoft 365 Monitoring Tool was able to highlight issues accessing Microsoft services Azure AD, Teams, Exchange Online, SharePoint and OneDrive. Our clients were able to drill down into our software to find where the issue was and plan accordingly. The way the outage unfolded, it seems the ISP issue was either due to a routing or connectivity issue. 

Detecting Latency in Network Connectivity

ENow checks the network connectivity to Microsoft services. When we looked at this report for Exchange Online, once the traffic hit the Microsoft network, latency was introduced which is a lot higher than normal. As you can see in Figure 2, the Elapsed Time jumps from 1 millisecond to nearly 200 milliseconds.  

Figure 2: Illustration of ENow's Network Connectivity Report. 

The following Microsoft 365 Monitoring Reports showed that these services were unable to connect to the remote server.

Figure 3: Screenshot that shows connectivity issues with Exchange Online. The endpoint was unreachable.  

Figure 4: This shows the issue encountered when attempting to access Microsoft Teams. 

Figure 5: ENow's SLA reports also began to report downtime across several services. 

How Can a Microsoft 365 Monitoring Tool Help You?  

With our Microsoft 365 Monitoring and Reporting tool, IT departments can detect outages in a timely manner. This helps IT teams communicate effectively, which ultimately builds trust between users and the department. Microsoft 365 Monitoring and Reporting can pinpoint if the problem is in-house or a Microsoft issue so you can plan your remediation strategy quickly and effectively.  

Outages are inevitable. If you’re looking to get through them with better data, quicker answers, and less stress, contact us for a demo. 

The Importance of Microsoft 365 Monitoring

Outages are bound to happen in a cloud world. While Microsoft is responsible for restoring service during outages, IT needs to take ownership of its 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 the root cause of the issues an organization is experiencing during a service outage by providing:

• ENow's OneLook dashboard allows you to monitor entire environments in one place, making it fast and easy to identify a problem without having to scramble through Twitter and the Service Health Dashboard looking for answers.
• ENow's remote probes provide a full picture of all services and a subset of services affected during an outage, covering 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!