Microsoft Office 365 Monitoring - Service Outages

On May 6^th, 2020, Microsoft reported an outage affecting users’ ability to join Microsoft Teams Live Events around ~ 2:00pm UTC.

At first, it was reported that only users in Europe and the UK were being affected. However, it soon became clear users were being affected all over, from Canada to Colombia, and to the APAC region. In an attempt to resolve the issue, Microsoft quickly redirected traffic to an alternate infrastructure. They also suggested recreating events to expedite remediation while the issue was resolved.

On April 28, 2020, Microsoft 365 reported a Microsoft Teams outage in the Asia Pacific region at ~ 9am UTC.

Initially, Microsoft reported that the outage only affected users’ ability to update their presence status. However, roughly two hours later, at ~11 pm UTC, Microsoft then reported that the outage was also affecting users’ ability to send and receive messages in Teams.

On Tuesday April 21, 2020 at ~8:00am UTC, Microsoft reported that an issue with Outlook was delaying several users in Australia from sending mail for up to four hours.

Many Immediately began expressing their frustrations with the increased number of outages Office 365 users have recently been experiencing in the past month. While others reported that they were seeing issues go well beyond the 4 hours Microsoft reported.

On April 14^th, 2020 at ~9:00am UTC, Microsoft reported that some users in the Netherlands may be unable to access Teams or may have audio/video quality issues along with other features.

Almost immediately after, several users in Europe and the U.S. began reporting issues including the UK, France, Sweden and Portugal. Users reported issues with chat not working, calls dropping, low audio quality, and blurry/blocked screens when screen sharing.

On March 31, 2020 at ~5:00am, Microsoft reported an issue with SharePoint Online performance that was affecting users in APAC, Japan, and Australia.

Soon after they reported that they had discovered a throttling rule that was being incorrectly applied to users, and they were working to disable it to mitigate impact.

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.

On March 17, 2020 at ~1:00pm, Microsoft reported an issue with Microsoft Teams chat service that was affecting users in the Europe region.

They reported that it was a caching issue within a component of their infrastructure but the issue had been resolved.

As IT Pros a major part of our responsibility is to keep our organizations IT services up and running. Historically this was a pretty straight forward job. It’s never been an easy job, but your software on your servers connected to your network makes everything straight forward. Moving services to Office 365 makes things much more complicated. How do you manage an outage for a cloud service? Is there any point to monitoring a cloud service when you can’t do anything to fix an outage?

Microsoft's latest outage reveals some attention points for Microsoft.

This past Thursday, May 2nd 2019, Microsoft suffered another outage on (parts of) its cloud services. The outage follows a series of outages, earlier this year, affecting a variety of online services including Azure, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, Intune, Microsoft Teams, etc.

It seems as if every summer something seemingly innocuous happens in a Microsoft datacenter halfway around the world and it spreads through the service like wildfire, taking down access for vast numbers of customers. It happened at the end of June last year in 2014, where Exchange Online and Lync Online were down for hours, and it has just happened again this week.