M365 - Exchange Online Center

If you are experiencing problems with an Office 365 service, the native option is to check Microsoft’s Service Health Dashboard (SHD) in your Microsoft 365 Admin Center to determine whether this is a known issue with a resolution in progress before you call support or spend valuable time troubleshooting. However, the information that is provided through the SHD is only of limited use, as it focuses primarily on the overall service health instead of tenant-specific or user-specific problems.

Microsoft 365 is not new. It’s been around for well over a decade, both in its current form as well as in its previous/current incarnation as Office 365, and before that we knew it as BPOS / Microsoft Online Services.

By now you must have heard that Microsoft is moving away from Basic Authentication and that all client authentications will move to Modern Authentication, and I've blogged about this previously.

Another thing that is happening is Microsoft moving away from TLS 1.0 and 1.1 and only allowing TLS 1.2 connections. This can have an impact on your organization too, so let’s have a look what is going to happen and why.

Microsoft has had a bad run lately. First, there was Solorigate, a major supply-chain attack (hack), through which attackers seem to have been able to access and copy (parts of) source code for various Microsoft (cloud) solutions, including Exchange and Intune. Next, at the beginning of March 2021, there was ‘Hafnium’, a severe vulnerability in Exchange Server which left all on-premises installations of Exchange Server vulnerable to exploitation by a web shell, enabling attackers to fairly easily establish foothold into the on-premises environment.

Over the last several years Microsoft has made tremendous headway in showcasing the value proposition of the Office 365 platform and suite of collaboration tools. In fact, the argument can be made that the Office 365 suite of tools has helped fuel the team-based way of working.

Reddit, a popular online discussion site, has a running joke: would rather fight a horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses? This bizarre question has surprising relevance to Office 365, because while Microsoft customers often worry about the threat of a widespread large outage (the horse-sized duck), they’re actually getting beat up by a larger number of smaller, less damaging but still annoying outages (the group of duck-sized horses). There are deeper issues here that warrant a closer look in order to understand what the real risks are, and what you can do about them.

As reported earlier, Office 365 was recently hit with a widespread issue. According to the case details that Microsoft posted to its service dashboard, the problems started around 6:15 PM (EST) on July 15 and were solved by July 15 at 9:30 PM (EST).