Office 365 Monitoring - Service Outages

On January 17, 2022, at ~02:06 am UTC, Microsoft communicated via tweet (@MSFT365status) that they were investigating an issue in which users were experiencing Exchange Online mailbox and calendar access issues.

For IT professionals and system admins with Microsoft admin center access, the incident # was EX315207.

Social media responses from the public were mild, with most users making comments as to which geo they were located in and whether or not their access was down. 

Within minutes of their initial tweet, Microsoft posted a second message confirming the geo regions impacted: Australia, North America and Japan.  Microsoft also stated that they had disabled a recently enabled "flight" in an effort to mitigate impact.

And by 03:51am UTC, it was all over.  Microsoft tweeted a final message as to issue # EX315207 and stated that they were confirming availability (all?) had been restored.  

A short-lived and minor service interruption it seems, but for any user impacted as well as any IT team responsible for those users, it may not have been a good start to the day.

On February 3, 2021  at ~10:45 pm UTC, Microsoft reported an issue that was causing some users in North America to experience issues with Exchange Online.

It seems as if every summer something seemingly innocuous  happens in a Microsoft datacenter halfway around the world and it spreads  around the service like wildfire, taking down access for vast numbers of  customers. It happened at the end of June last year in 2014, where Exchange  Online and Lync Online were down for hours, and it has just happened again this week.

The Outage

Here is how it started: at 5:28 PM Eastern time, Microsoft  officially establishes an ongoing incident report:

Current Status:  Engineers are investigating an issue in which some customers may be  experiencing problems accessing or using Exchange Online services or features.  This event is actively being investigated. More information will be provided  shortly.

29 minutes later, at 5:57 PM Eastern, the company  acknowledges that this outage is a reasonably widespread issue: