Yesterday was fun due to the M365 outage July 23rd. Microsoft services missing in action were Teams, OneDrive, Sharepoint, CoPilot and the admin panel. The wobbly services party started around 8am Pacific time.

How do you find out about M365 outages?

OneDrive wobbly? Teams meeting stuttering? Can’t make changes to your account? How do you find out about Microsoft and M365 outages?

You can go to the Microsoft services status page at https://status.cloud.microsoft if you can’t access service health via the admin centre in M365. However in the last major M365 outage earlier this year even that page was affected.

If you don’t have access to the admin panel, you can go to DownDetector. DownDectector monitors and receives reports from all kinds of cloud and internet services. You can even search for a particular service.

Microsoft also provides updates via X formerly known as Twitter here.

Was Microsoft hacked?

A lot of people assume when there’s an outage that there was a hack. Actually over the last 24 months most big Internet service outages (Rogers, M365) were caused by network configuration changes that weren’t tested properly before engineers deployed.

In this case Microsoft reports that routine maintenance changes caused 27 services to wobble. More details on exact causes here.

M365 outage July 23rd

As businesses rely more and more on cloud services it can be hard to diagnose when those services start to wobble or fail. Is it your network? Is it your internet service provider? Is it your application provider?

Keep support numbers for all your services handy off the cloud and use DownDetector.