Microsoft Outage MO842351: Understanding Impact & Scope Saves You From Raising Unnecessary Alarm Bells

Just ten days after the last major Microsoft 365 outage, Microsoft reported another incident at 8:48 am on July 30, 2024. The message on X was vague, offering limited details about the scope and impact of the problem. This left many IT teams preparing for what they anticipated would be another rocky day.

False Alarm for Many Companies

However, it turned out that very few Martello customers were affected by this incident. Those using Vantage DX dashboards could see that Microsoft 365 services were performing well throughout their organization. Despite Microsoft’s indication of a problem, Vantage DX customers could understand the outage’s scope and impact on their specific organization, avoiding unnecessary alarm and costly back-up plans.

For the few customers who did experience issues, the performance problems were sporadic and affected only one or two services, not at any significant scale.

Case Example: One Enterprise Only Experienced Power BI Performance Issues

In one instance, a customer noticed they were not meeting their SLA targets for PowerBI. Based on this limited impact, they chose to inform only their PowerBI users of potential sporadic access issues, rather than broadcasting a Microsoft 365 outage to the entire organization. They also avoided implementing backup plans, recognizing that their business could endure a brief PowerBI outage more easily than disruptions to other critical services like Microsoft Teams.

Vantage DX Customers Understand Impact On Their Organization

Vantage DX customers can quickly discern which services are impacted and the severity and extent of these impacts. Understanding the scope and impact of global Microsoft outages on their specific organization, often before Microsoft acknowledges a problem, helps them avoid raising false alarms that can reduce employee productivity when the impact is minimal.

In the case of Microsoft outages that are widespread and severely impacting, like the July 18 Microsoft outage, Vantage DX gives you an early warning so you are prepared.  Almost an hour before Microsoft acknowledged a problem, Vantage DX customers were able to  pinpoint Microsoft as the root cause.  They were able to use this hour to communicate the outage to users, and implement back-up plans, instead of troubleshooting problems that only Microsoft could solve.

So What Happened on July 30, 2024?

Microsoft indicated that only a subset of customers experienced issues connecting to some services globally due to performance issues with specific network paths in Azure. By 4:06 pm ET, Microsoft updated that “the vast majority of customers and services are fully mitigated and we are in the final stages of validating recovery.”

But of course, Vantage DX customers already knew that!

Book your free Outage Readiness Assessment today.

See how Vantage DX provides early alerts so your IT team can spring into action, deploy backup plans, and notify users, avoiding the chaos of troubleshooting an unfixable problem.