Office 365 Monitoring: Outlook Outage July 15, 2020

On July 15^th, 2020 at ~ 4:30 pm UTC, Microsoft reported an issue that was affecting users’ ability to access Outlook.

They soon after reported that they were investigating a recently deployed update that they thought may be the source of the issue.

Not long after, many started expressing their frustrations with the major effects the outage was having on their organizations. Some reported over 1,000 users within their organization that were unable to access outlook. Others expressed frustrations with the multiple recent outages that stemmed from an update that was launched without proper testing.

Microsoft posted a vague update in the admin center that left users with a lot of unanswered questions.

Roughly 3 hours later, Microsoft reported that they were rolling out a fix for the issue and expected the mitigation to reach all customers within a few hours.

Finally, at ~10:30 pm, Microsoft reported that they had completed the fix rollout and confirmed that service had been restored.

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!