Microsoft Faces Fourth Outage in Six Weeks; Exchange Online Inaccessible

Reports came in late Thursday of the fourth Microsoft 365 outage since September 28th. According to Microsoft 365’s outage Twitter account, issues began late in the workday for the East Coast in North America, at around 3 PM, with users unable to access their mailboxes through Exchange Online. According to Downdetector, the hardest-hit areas are surrounding major cities like London, New York, Boston, Washington, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Microsoft later determined the cause of the outage was a ‘network driver issue’, and an ETA on a fix is not immediately known.

For businesses around the globe, starting the workday only to find a business-critical system like email inaccessible is certainly not ideal. While businesses may not have the power to get their Microsoft services back up and running, they do have an opportunity to access data that may be otherwise inaccessible while Microsoft is down with the help of a comprehensive third-party cloud backup tool.

Businesses these days rely heavily on their inboxes to get the job done. From team collaboration to conversations with potential customers, email drives much of a business’s day-to-day operations. With backup tools like Backupify, IT departments can easily export all email conversations to ensure clients’ can continue remote collaboration without disruption.

Update: 11/10/20

Microsoft resolved issues that resulted from the November 5th outage, the original post date of this blog. On November 10th, the Microsoft 365 Status Twitter account reported another outage resulting in users unable to access Outlook.com and OneDrive.com. It’s important for businesses to recognize that tools like Microsoft OneDrive are not sufficient as a backup solution. If Microsoft OneDrive is unavailable, so are your duplicated files.