Office 365 Monitoring - Service Outages

On March 3, 2022, at ~09:02 am UTC, Microsoft communicated via tweet (@MSFT365status) that they were investigating a service incident involving Microsoft 365 Admin Center access issues.

Initially, Microsoft provided no incident # for system admins and IT pros to reference within the Microsoft Admin Center, because access to the Admin Center was the issue at hand. Instead, Microsoft directed impacted users to refence the Microsoft 365 health status site,  status.office.com.

On February 3, 2022, at ~04:36 am UTC, Microsoft communicated via tweet (@MSFT365status) that they were investigating an issue in which users (in Europe) were unable to access the Microsoft 365 admin portal.

Initially, Microsoft provided no incident # for users to reference, as any user experiencing issues may not have been able to access the admin portal to gather additional information as to the incident #. In its place, Microsoft was directing impacted users to access status.office.com for updated information as to the service incident.

On July 29, 2021, at ~3:35 am UTC, Microsoft announced that they were looking into an issue in which users in Germany potentially could have access issues or degraded experiences for Microsoft 365 services.

The incident number was MO273940.

On July 2, 2021, at ~9:47 am UTC, Microsoft indicated that they were investigating an issue in which users were experiencing latency or were unable to access multiple Microsoft 365 services.

The incident number was MO266345.

At the time of the first report from Microsoft, the issue appeared to be limited to Chile, South America.  Some responses on social media suggested Microsoft Service disruptions in other geos, but the majority of initial indicators pinpointed the issue to Chile.

On April 22, 2021, at ~2:55 pm UTC, Microsoft reported a potential Exchange Online mailflow incident impacting users in North America. 

On April 8, 2021 at ~8:15 pm UTC, Microsoft reported an issue that was preventing users in LATAM from accessing Microsoft 365 services and features. 

On April 1, 2021 at ~10:43 pm UTC, Microsoft reported an issue that was preventing users from accessing the Microsofts' Azure cloud services and Microsoft 365 services. And no, unfortunately this is not an April Fools joke. 

Shortly after Microsoft's initial report, Microsoft tweeted that they were investigating a potential DNS issue and were evaluating mitigation options. They soon after reported that they had rerouted traffic to their resilient DNS capabilities and were seeing improvement in service availability. 

On March 31st, 2021 at ~1:45 am UTC, Microsoft reported an issue that was preventing users from accessing the Microsoft admin center.

Shortly after Microsoft's initial report, Microsoft tweeted again stating that this issue was affecting users in the United Kingdom, France, and Central United States

On March 18, 2021 at ~4:30 pm UTC, Microsoft reported an issue that was preventing users in EMEA from access Microsoft 365 services.

Users took to Twitter to express frustration with the recent string of outages over the past couple of weeks.

Throughout this post, we will be dissecting the key events of the worldwide Microsoft 365 services outage that spanned over 9 hours on March 15th 2021. 

On March 15th, 2021 at 8:40 pm UTC, Microsoft reported an issues that was preventing users from accessing Microsoft 365 services.Shortly after, they confirmed that the issue could be affecting users worldwide.