Office 365 Monitoring: SharePoint Online Outage March 31, 2020

On March 31st, 2020 at ~5:15am UTC, users started experiencing issues with SharePoint Online.

It seems that the major areas affected were APAC, Japan and Australia. However, some users in Europe reported they were affected as well.

During this time, many admins had to turn to Twitter for official Office 365 monitoring outage updates.

Microsoft soon reported that the root cause of the issues users were experiencing was due to a throttling rule being incorrectly applied to users and they were attempting to disable it to mitigate impact.

Many expressed concerns about losing the ability to edit documents and even expressed frustrations about losing hours of work. This outage has major affects on productivity for users since they were unable to edit or access documents for close to 12 hours. 

Microsoft reported roughly 8 hours later at ~1:15pm UTC that they were still experiencing issues but were close to resolving impact.

Roughly two hours later, around 3 pm UTC, Microsoft reported that the issue had been resolved.

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!