Office 365 Monitoring: Teams PSTN Calls Outage (Oct. 7, 2021)

On October 7, 2021, at ~9:25 am UTC, Microsoft communicated via tweet (@MSFT365status) that they were investigating an issue in which some users were unable to make or receive PSTN calls.

Microsoft also indicated in this first notification that Europe was the only known impacted geo. The incident number for IT pros with admin center access was TM289868. The last outage/service interruption that Microsoft communicated was just 3 days ago (October 4th).

Responses on social media were quick and in abundance, with many people indicating that the impacted geos extended to the US and Canada.  The public responses at this time gave indications that calls made through Teams were impacted.   A check with  status.office.com showed no information whatsoever as to any service issues.

Approximately one hour after first reporting, Microsoft was indicating that their investigation had determined that the is "could" affect ANY user attempting to make or receive PSTN calls.

By approximately 11:00 am UTC, Microsoft was disclosing that due to a recent update there was a misconfiguration for PSTN requests.  Microsoft also announced that they were reverting the update in an effort to resolve the issue.  Some Twitter followers were commenting that they were seeing restoration of services as to PSTN calls.

Approximately some 3 hours after first reporting, Microsoft had communicated that the issue was resolved.  Whatever update reversion was conducted appeared to have fixed the issue with PSTN calls.  Although, it should be noted, some Twitter followers were still chiming in that the issue, from their end, had not been resolved.  And as of 1:00 pm UTC, status.office.com was still showing no information whatsoever as to any lingering or new service issue.

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 networks and 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!