Top Office 365 Outage Tips, Alerts and Resources

Microsoft’s Office 365 has had a rough year when it comes to service outages. While every outage is different, one thing remains constant – disruption to your organization.

UPDATE: December 10, 2021: The major AWS outage this week was an unfortunate reminder that no matter who your cloud provider is, no matter how large or small your organization is, no matter who or where your customer base is, outages or service incidents will have a significant impact to your business. Mitigate such business impacts with the right monitoring and reporting solution.

Just think about the three major back-to-back outages this year for Microsoft:

• June 11, 12 and 15: 3 separate Teams outages (~14 hours combined)
• May 28: separate Exchange and Outlook outages on the same day (~26 hours combined)
• May 11: Outlook outage (~8 hours)
• April 1: DNS outage impacting Microsoft 365 and Azure (~5 hours)
• March 18: EMEA Microsoft 365 service outage (~6 hours)
• March 15: Global Azure AD (~9 hours)

How were you first alerted? Were you prepared? How did you respond? Were you able to calculate IT downtime and lost productivity among your end-users?

As recent as a few weeks ago, there was a reported OneDrive incident, which later trickled into complaints of being unable to access the Microsoft admin center, thus compounding an already difficult business day for many. In this article, we provide you with many resources that will help you prepare for future Microsoft outages and incidents.

Native Microsoft Outage Resources

At a minimum, we recommend following the Microsoft outage resources below. However, only relying on a simple native alert still will not provide you with what you need to know the most: a root cause analysis and the impacts to your specific environment. But following these online resources is a start in the right direction for minimizing disruption caused by Office 365 outages:

• Microsoft Azure Service Health
  
  
• @azuresupport
  
  
• Microsoft 365 Service Health
  
  
• @Microsoft365status

ENow’s Office 365 Outage Center – Root Cause Analysis

Enow’s Office 365 Outage Center provides in-depth reports of recent Office 365 outages, including the regions and Office 365 applications (Teams, Exchange Online, OneDrive, etc.) impacted, as well as Microsoft’s resolutions. Outage news is typically reported on the same day it occurs.

[White Paper] Troublshooting 101: Resolving Office 365 Service Issues FAST

Office 365 drives digital workplace maturity, but hidden availability, outages and performance challenges impact service and end-user experience. While many believe the myth that ALL monitoring responsibilities now fall on Microsoft, IT is often still on the hook. In this white paper, you will learn how to:

• Troubleshoot tough IT problems
• Understand native tool gaps
• Assess your current strategy
• Identify a clear, actionable picture of the state of your cloud services

[Webinar Series] Office 365 Outage Impacts Part 1: Office 365 End User Experience & Why it Matters

In this on-demand webinar, Microsoft MCSM Justin Harris  discusses a modern user-centric approach to monitoring cloud-based solutions and addresses the following topics:

• How do you monitor the experience of remote users?
• How do you know when there is a remote outage
• What is the quickest way to respond to outages?

Dozens of questions arise when a cloud-based outage occurs. This webinar will provide answers, solutions and the best insights accumulated over the years.

[Webinar Series] Office 365 Outage Impacts Part 2: How to Triage & Prepare for Business Continuity

If anything, this year has taught us outages are bound to happen and at any scale. It's Murphy's law, "What can go wrong, will go wrong." While Microsoft is responsible for restoring service during outages, IT needs to take ownership of their environment and user experience.

• Identify the scope of impact
• Properly communicating with end-users and management
• Restoring workplace productivity

In this on-demand webinar Michael Van Horenbeeck (MVP) and Jay Gundotra (ENow Technical Founder) will discuss actionable insights to ensure your organization is prepared for the next outage.

Outages are a reminder that organizations are at the mercy of cloud providers, like Microsoft. However, it is IT’s reputation that is still on the hook during an outage. Take a proactive approach and leverage valuable and informative resources to stay ahead.

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!