Office 365 Monitoring: Office 365 Services Outage September 28, 2020

On September 28th at roughly ~9:45 pm UTC, Microsoft reported an issue affecting multiple Microsoft 365 services.

Microsoft reported that they were working to identify the full impact and that they would provide more information shortly.

Users were encouraged to look for more information on the outage in the admin under M0222965 as well as status.office.com. Unfortunately, many users were receiving reports that all services were up and running while others were unable to access the site all together.

At ~10:15pm UTC, Microsoft reported that they had identified a recent change that appeared to be the source of the issue and were rolling back the change to mitigate impact.

Shortly after Microsoft reported that they had rolled back the change that was likely the source of impact and are monitoring the environment to validate that service is recovering.

Unfortunately, shortly after Microsoft reported that they had implemented a fix, they shared that they were not observing an increase in successful connections after rolling back a recent change and that they were working to evaluate additional mitigation solutions.

Over 2 hours after Microsofts initial post about the Microsoft 365 services outage, Microsoft reported that they were rerouting traffic to alternate infrastructure to improve the user experience while they continue to investigate the issue.

Finally just after ~12:30 pm UTC, Microsoft reported that they had started seeing improvement for multiple services after applying mitigations steps and that they would continue to monitor the situation.

Microsoft shared another update on the outage at ~2:20 am and reported that the majority of services were restored for most users and that they were still closely monitoring some residual impact for a subset of users in North America

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 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!