Microsoft Grapples With ‘Recurrence’ Of Microsoft 365 Service Issues

‘I’m glad this wasn’t more widespread and that we aren’t seeing our customers complaining about the issue,’ says Avatar CEO Jason Wright. ‘Cloud issues have become common place in today’s marketplace. It is like bad cell phone coverage. People just accept it.’

Microsoft Tuesday said it was experiencing a “recurrence” of service issues that hit its Microsoft 365 cloud service on Monday.

“We’re seeing a recurrence of the issue and a drop in service availability, so we’re applying mitigations to provide relief for the affected users, while we continue to investigate the root cause,” said Microsoft in a tweet on its Microsoft 365 Status twitter feed at 5:06 a.m. EST on Tuesday. “We’ll be providing updates related to this event under MO572252 in the admin center.”

At 12:03 p.m. EST, Microsoft said that it had “identified that the impact has started again” and that it was applying further mitigation. “Telemetry indicates a reduction in impact relative to earlier iterations due to previously applied mitigations,” said Microsoft.

CRN reached out to Microsoft for additional details and comment but had not heard back at press time.

On Tuesday at 11:22 a.m. EST, DownDetector, which tracks services outages, reported that 3,118 users were reporting Microsoft 365 problems. DownDetector said 85 percent of those issues affected Outlook.

Users reported issues with Microsoft 365 mainly in Boston, New York and Washington, D.C., according to a DownDetector map.

“Another day of struggling with Outlook,” said one user on the DownDetector site. “No search function and very slow to load emails, if at all. Get your act together, Microsoft.”

Jason Wright, the CEO of Avatar, a Houston, Texas-based MSP, said so far he has had no complaints from customers on the Microsoft 365 service issues.

“I’m glad this wasn’t more widespread and that we aren’t seeing our customers complaining about the issue,” said Wright. “Cloud issues have become common place in today’s marketplace. It is like bad cell phone coverage. People just accept it.”

Avatar, for its part, has proactiavely worked with its customers on business continuity plans in anticipation of service issues, said Wright.

“Unfortunately there is not much we can do when there is this kind of outage,” said Wright. “To a certain degree when we went from Office on a desktop system to Microsoft 365 in the cloud we traded reliability for cost efficiencies. When this happens we notify customers and try to be empathetic.”

Michael Goldstein, CEO of LAN Infotech, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., solution provider, said he has also not had any complaints from users on Microsoft 365.

“We have had zero complaints,” he said. “You have to remember it depends on where the service issue is and where your Microsoft 365 mailboxes are located in the cloud. With Azure you can pick a data center, but with Microsoft 365 you have no idea where your mailboxes are located. In some cases, mailboxes are across multiple data centers.”

Goldstein said the Microsoft 365 service issues are part and parcel of doing business given the move from Exchange server on premise to the cloud. “That ship sailed,” he said. “This is just the reality of doing business in the cloud.”

The Microsoft 365 ‘recurrence” came after an outage affected tens-of-thousands of Microsoft 365 users Monday morning as a result of an unspecified “update” that was halted. At that point Microsoft said it prevented a “potentially problematic update” from propagating further across the service and is reviewing options to revert the change quickly in those portions of Microsoft’s infrastructure where it has been applied.

“We’ve halted an ongoing deployment and are monitoring services to see if that provides relief to the environment,” said Microsoft at 12:03 p.m. ET on Monday.