Office 365 Monitoring - Service Outages Blog

Search Functionality Issues within Microsoft 365

Written by ENow Software | Apr 26, 2023 2:48:45 PM

On Monday, April 24, 2023, at approximately 7:17 AM ET, Microsoft sent out its first of many tweets for the day @MSFT365status regarding an issue in which users were unable to use certain search functions in various Microsoft 365 services.  With this first tweet, Microsoft disclosed no information as to what geographic regions were impacted.

For system admins and IT professionals with access to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, the service incident number to reference was MO545600.

 

 

Prior to today, Microsoft's last reported service incident was on April 20, 2023, and this prior incident involved access issues for Microsoft 365 online apps and the Microsoft Teams Admin Center.

There were many responses from the community throughout the day, many of them voicing frustration as to issues with Microsoft services yet again.  Other community responses confirmed issues with Office 365 search functions and some questioned whether this issue was related to an issue in which some users were seeing error screens when starting Microsoft Teams.

At 9:45 AM ET, Microsoft sent out a second message, announcing that a "fix" had been developed internally but not yet deployed.

 

 

Approximately 5 hours after first reporting the issue on Twitter, Microsoft's next tweet provided only status quo information, that they were still only testing internally a possible fix.

 

 

Two hours later, after having promised a 60 minute completion time in their previous message, Microsoft was still status quo with the issue: a possible "fix" was still being tested internally.

 

 

For their next public message, Microsoft was again making a "60-minute to complete" promise to the community, despite testing of the fix still being conducted on their end.

 

 

Some 12 hours after their first tweet regarding MO545600, the issue was still not resolved.  Microsoft had at this time confirmed that a temporary fix deployment was underway, and that impacted users should see some sort of service restoration.  Fix deployments, as well as ongoing validation that the fix was indeed working, would continue throughout the evening for Microsoft.

Additionally, Microsoft made it clear that they were at the same time still working on validating a primary and long-term fix for this issue.

 

 

 

 

As Monday turned into Tuesday, Microsoft had still not fully resolved the matter.  Their next tweets on April 25 were somewhat hopeful in that Microsoft was at least confirming that search functions had returned for some users.  But, a full restoration was still not confirmed.

 

 

 

It should be noted that while service incident MO545600 was still not fully resolved, Microsoft during this time reported and resolved a separate service incident EX546390 involving Exchange Online connectivity issues for users in North America.

Finally, at approximately 6:30 PM ET, Microsoft sent out their final tweet regarding MO545600 declaring the issue completely resolved and all users would no longer experience this search functionality issue in Micrsosoft 365.

 

 

 

The Importance of Microsoft 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 Microsoft 365 Monitoring and Reporting solution enables IT Pros to pinpoint the exact services affected and the 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 Microsoft 365 apps and other cloud-based collaboration services.

Identify the scope of Microsoft 365 service outage impacts and restore workplace productivity with ENow’s Microsoft 365 Monitoring and Reporting solution. Access your free 14-day trialtoday!