The latest Tweets from Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status). The official @Microsoft account for updates on certain @Microsoft365 service incidents. (Formerly @Office365Status). FoxLogic - Innovative Technology Solutions. — Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) February 3, 2020 Microsoft Teams is a communication platform for businesses that includes chat, video meetings and file storage. Originally published Feb.
You can view the health of your Microsoft services, including Office on the web, Yammer, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and mobile device management cloud services, on the Service health page in the Microsoft 365 admin center. If you are experiencing problems with a cloud service, you can check the service health to determine whether this is a known issue with a resolution in progress before you call support or spend time troubleshooting.
If you are unable to sign in to the admin center, you can use the service status page to check for known issues preventing you from logging into your tenant. Also sign up to follow us at @MSFT365status on Twitter to see information on certain events.
How to check service health
Go to the Microsoft 365 admin center at https://admin.microsoft.com, and sign in with an admin account.
Note
People who are assigned the global admin or service support admin role can view service health. To allow Exchange, SharePoint, and Skype for Business admins to view service health, they must also be assigned the Service admin role. For more information about roles that can view service health, see About admin roles.
If you are not using the new admin center, on the Home page, select the Try the new admin center toggle in the upper-right corner.
To view service health, in the admin center, go to Health > Service health, or select the Service health card on the Home dashboard. The dashboard card indicates whether there is an active service issue and links to the detailed Service health page.
On the Service health page, the health state of each cloud service is shown in a table format.
The All services tab (the default view) shows all services and their current health state. An icon and the Status column indicate the state of each service.
To filter your view to services currently experiencing an incident, select the Incidents tab at the top of the page. Selecting the Advisories tab will show only services that currently have an advisory posted.
The History tab shows the history of incidents and advisories that have been resolved.
If you're experiencing an issue with a Microsoft 365 service and you don’t see it listed on the Service health page, tell us about it by selecting Report an issue, and completing the short form. We’ll look at related data and reports from other organizations to see how widespread the issue is, and if it originated with our service. If it did, we’ll add it as a new incident or advisory on the Service health page, where you can track its resolution. If you don’t see it appear on the list within about 30 minutes, consider contacting support to resolve the issue.
To customize your view of which services show up on the dashboard, select Preferences > Custom view, and clear the check boxes for the services you want to filter out of your Service health dashboard view. Make sure that the check box is selected for each service that you want to monitor.
To sign up for email notifications of new incidents that affect your tenant and status changes for an active incident, select Preferences > Email, click Send me service heath notifications in email, and then specify:
- Up to two email addresses.
- Whether you want notifications for incidents or advisories
- The services for which you want notification
Note
Each admin can have their Preferences set and the above limit of two email address is per admin account.
Tip
You can also use the Microsoft 365 Admin app on your mobile device to view Service health, which is a great way to stay current with push notifications.
View details of posted service health
On the All services view, selecting the service status will open a summary view of advisories or incidents.
The advisory or incident summary provides the following information:
- Title - A summary of the problem.
- Service - The name of the affected service.
- ID - A numeric identifier for the problem.
- Status - How this problem affects the service.
- Start time - The time when the issue started.
- Last updated - The last time that the service health message was updated. We post frequent messages to let you know the progress that we're making in applying a solution.
Select the issue title to see the issue detail page, which shows more information about the issue, including the history of all messages posted while we work on a solution.
Translate service health details
Because service health explanations are posted in real-time, they are not automatically translated to your language and the details of a service event are in English only. To translate the explanation, follow these steps:
Go to Translator.
On the Service health page, select an incident or advisory. Under Show details, copy the text about the issue.
In Translator, paste the text and choose Translate.
Definitions
Most of the time, services will appear as healthy with no further information. When a service is having a problem, the issue is identified as either an advisory or an incident and shows a current status.
Tip
Planned maintenance events aren't shown in service health. You can track planned maintenance events by staying up to date with the Message center. Filter to messages categorized as Plan for change to find out when the change is going to happen, its effect, and how to prepare for it. See Message center in Microsoft 365 for more details.
Incidents and advisories
| Icon | Description |
|---|---|
| If a service has an advisory shown, we are aware of a problem that is affecting some users, but the service is still available. In an advisory, there is often a workaround to the problem and the problem may be intermittent or is limited in scope and user impact. | |
| If a service has an active incident shown, it's a critical issue and the service or a major function of the service is unavailable. For example, users may be unable to send and receive email or unable to sign-in. Incidents will have noticeable impact to users. When there is an incident in progress, we will provide updates regarding the investigation, mitigation efforts, and confirmation of resolution in the Service health dashboard. |
Status definitions
| Status | Definition |
|---|---|
| Investigating | We're aware of a potential issue and are gathering more information about what's going on and the scope of impact. |
| Service degradation | We've confirmed that there is an issue that may affect use of a service or feature. You might see this status if a service is performing more slowly than usual, there are intermittent interruptions, or if a feature isn't working, for example. |
| Service interruption | You'll see this status if we determine that an issue affects the ability for users to access the service. In this case, the issue is significant and can be reproduced consistently. |
| Restoring service | The cause of the issue has been identified, we know what corrective action to take, and are in the process of bringing the service back to a healthy state. |
| Extended recovery | This status indicates that corrective action is in progress to restore service to most users but will take some time to reach all the affected systems. You might also see this status if we've made a temporary fix to reduce impact while we wait to apply a permanent fix. |
| Investigation suspended | If our detailed investigation of a potential issue results in a request for additional information from customers to allow us to investigate further, you'll see this status. If we need you to act, we'll let you know what data or logs we need. |
| Service restored | We've confirmed that corrective action has resolved the underlying problem and the service has been restored to a healthy state. To find out what went wrong, view the issue details. |
| False positive | After a detailed investigation, we’ve confirmed the service is healthy and operating as designed. No impact to the service was observed or the cause of the incident originated outside of the service. |
| Post-incident report published | We’ve published a Post Incident Report for a specific issue that includes root cause information and next steps to ensure a similar issue doesn’t reoccur. |
History
Service health lets you look at current health status and view the history of any service advisories and incidents that have affected your tenant in the past 30 days. To view the past health of all services, select View history on the issue detail page.
A list of all service health messages posted in the selected timeframe is displayed, as shown below:
Expand any row to view more details about the issue.
For more information about our commitment to uptime, see Transparent operations from Microsoft 365.
Related topics
Activity Reports in the Microsoft 365 admin centerMessage center Preferences
How to check Windows release health on admin center
Have you ever tried to log into Office 365, Microsoft Teams,Outlook, or SharePoint Online and you get an error that won’t let you in? You wonder, huh, am I the only one? Is the system down? Well, there’s a pretty easy way to get notified when many of the apps and services in Microsoft 365 are down. For a video version of this post—which provides a demo on how to do it all—click play below.
And the way to do this is to use Twitter. I know for many of you it leaves a super sour taste in your mouth. But it turns out, the most timely and—at least in my experience and my opinion—best source for updates onMicrosoft and Office 365 status is the Twitter handle @MSFT365Status.
A Microsoft employee somewhere out in the Twitter ether is posting updates about service outages for us. The reason I trust this source the most is due to their past performance. Reputations still mean something, even in the fire-scape of 2020. And this handle almost always posts before anything shows up in the Microsoft 365 Admin Message Center. It’s also easy to follow updates because updates are added to the thread, so you can see what time they were posted.
See? Twitter can be useful. It’s not just a hell hole of politics, the Kardashians, and conspiracy theories.
To get these notifications, open up your iOS or Android phone or tablet, open your app store, download Twitter, and create an account. Once you’re logged in, search for @MSFT365Status. Click Follow. Then click the little bell icon. This will send push notifications on your phone. If you haven’t allowed the Twitter app to send push notifications on your phone, you’ll have to allow them now. And that’s basically it. The next time they tweet, you’ll get a push notification.
Now, this isn’t perfect. Unfortunately these tweets are still written by technical people with the intention of a technical audience. But you can definitely get through it.
For example, let’s look at the tweet below. Even though they mention Exchange Online, you can do a quick search to see what that means: hint, it means email and Outlook. While you won’t be able to access the issue item they reference if you’re not an admin, you can still follow the thread they update over the course of the outage.
Now if we look at the tweet below, it’s pretty clear that SharePoint email alerts were not working for whatever reason. It was resolved pretty quickly. No major issue, and it was written in reasonably standard everyday speak.
Now, why is this even necessary? Well, did you happen to notice a couple weeks that Microsoft Teams was down? Yeah, it was a MAJOR system outage, as the technical folks would call it. And technically, it wasn’t even Microsoft Teams. It was an underlying tool that makes Teams work. But it meant you couldn’t get into Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, Planner, and a number of other Office 365 apps. Office.com itself was even giving me a problem, so I couldn’t even edit Word files on my desktop since it requires me to be signed in. It was, frankly, a bit of a fiasco.
And I say all this knowing that when you watch this, my reference is completely outdated. But actually it’s not. Because it will happen again. Because, well, humans. Humans are fallible, humans built a system, system is fallible, system will break once in a while.
Now, Office 365 administrators have access to the Admin Message Center, which gives updates, but that’s not publicly available, unfortunately. And it means that your best bet if you’re not an administrator—which is like 99% of us—is to use Twitter. Sure, there are other options, but I find this to be the best one.
So that’s how you can keep up with the service status of Microsoft and Office 365. It’s not perfect. They may leave out information. It may be a little delayed sometimes. But it’s better than nothing and many times better than what our IT admins send us, which, many times is actually nothing.
Msft365status Twitter
Thanks so much for reading. Don’t forget I have another post covering 9 resources you should follow to stay up to date with the never-endingOffice 365 life cycle. And if there’s anything you think I left out here, please leave a comment below so others can learn. Happy dealing with your anxiety now that you’ll be getting updates on Office 365 status.
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