Office 365 Monitoring - Service Outages

On January 12, 2022, at ~01:49 am UTC, Microsoft communicated via tweet (@MSFT365status) that they were investigating an issue in which users in the UAE were experiencing mailbox access issues.

For IT professionals and system admins with Microsoft admin center access, Microsoft provided three issue #'s: EX313705, EX313731 and MO313750.

Public responses on Twitter confirmed that the issue was impacting many users, but did appear to be self-contained to users in the UAE.

Approximately 1 hour after its first report on Twitter, Microsoft followed up with another brief message that their investigation thus far pointed towards a networking problem as the potential cause.  Microsoft was at this time continuing its investigation and network analysis.

Some public responses on Twitter were from users in the UAE who were able to workaround the issue and access their Outlook mailboxes by using personal phones and phone hotspots for their computers.

Several minutes after their previous tweet @MSFT365status, Microsoft reported that their investigation into the issue and cause continued.  They also provided an additional incident # (EX313731).

By 4:17 am UTC, Microsoft was reporting that a third-party DNS issue was likely the cause of the Outlook mailbox access issues in the UAE.  Microsoft also provided a new (third) incident # (MO313750).  The third-party name was never disclosed by Microsoft, but several followers on Twitter reported UAE service providers Etisalat and Du may have been experiencing service issues.  Etisalat's own public responses @Etisalat_Care confirmed that Etisalat was experiencing issues as to its own services provided to users in the UAE.

Several hours after their first report @MSFT365status, Microsoft indicated that the impact to users in the appeared to be over.  Microsoft was continuing its investigation efforts as to root cause, and they were continuing to monitor service.

At 08:04 am UTC, Microsoft gave its final communication as to the matter, stating that service remained stable and the issue was fully resolved.

On November 10th, 2020 at ~5:15pm UTC, Microsoft reported an outage preventing some users from accessing Outlook.com and that additional information would be provided shortly.

On October 1st at roughly ~6:00 am UTC, Microsoft reported an issue where users were accessing their Exchange Online accounts via Outlook on the Web. 

The initial investigation indicated that the issue was primarily affecting users based in India. However, shortly after Microsoft reported that they had collected additional data from the affected infrastructure and that the issue was affecting users worldwide.

On July 15^th, 2020 at ~ 4:30 pm UTC, Microsoft reported an issue that was affecting users’ ability to access Outlook.

They soon after reported that they were investigating a recently deployed update that they thought may be the source of the issue.

On July 9, 2020 at ~12:00 pm UTC Microsoft reported that they were investigating an issue where users in the UK are unable to access the Exchange Online service through the Outlook client.

Shortly after, several UK users began expressing their frustration with the recent increase in the number of outages users have experienced all over the world. Some expressed frustrations recommending Microsoft services to their clients and others insisted that the they were still experiencing issues hours later.

On June 25^th, 2020 at ~2:00 pm UTC, Microsoft reported that they were investigating connectivity problems with Outlook in Europe and the United Kingdom.

Roughly an hour later, Microsoft reported that they were starting to see service restoration and were still monitoring the issue closely to ensure the issue was resolved.

On June 15^th at ~1:00pm UTC, Microsoft reported an issue with Outlook client within Europe.

They soon after reported that the issue may be preventing users from connecting to Exchange online when using Outlook client and they were continuing to troubleshoot the issue.

On May 7^th, 2020 at ~9:00pm UTC, Microsoft reported that they were deploying a solution to address an issue in which users may be experiencing repeated credential prompts within the Outlook client when using Classic Authentication.

On Tuesday April 21, 2020 at ~8:00am UTC, Microsoft reported that an issue with Outlook was delaying several users in Australia from sending mail for up to four hours.

Many Immediately began expressing their frustrations with the increased number of outages Office 365 users have recently been experiencing in the past month. While others reported that they were seeing issues go well beyond the 4 hours Microsoft reported.

On April 13^th, 2020 at ~12:00am UTC, Microsoft reported that users in the Australia region could experience issues signing in or accessing Outlook.com

Some users reported experiencing issues with other Microsoft services including Microsoft Teams. While others expressed frustrations with issues they’d been experiencing throughout the week and reported on the issues they were currently experiencing.