Office 365 Woes…..Lync Online Failure Yesterday, Exchange Online Today, Plus Ongoing Office 365 Billing Problems

On June 24, 2014

This is a bad week for Microsoft Office 365 customers who rely on Office 365 for their day-to-day business. Microsoft Lync Online was out of commission for 100% of the customers on June 23, 2014 for about 8 hours. That’s a long time. Customers also lost access to voicemails via Exchange Online for almost 9 hours. Today it was Exchange Online that was down for over 6 hours. Imagine the cost of these outages to the business customers. Here are some of the details.

Office 365 Lync Online Outage Yesterday

At 10:33am Microsoft’s notification on my Office 365 stated the following:

Jun 23, 2014 10:33 AM
Current Status: Engineers have determined that a portion of network infrastructure which routes network traffic was in a degraded state. Engineers have shifted traffic to alternate capacity and are now checking service health.
Customer Impact: Affected customers are seeing a spinning circle when attempting to sign in to the Lync Online Service. Customers who were connected to the service were signed out, and were then unable to sign back in.
Percent of Users Affected: Customers experiencing this issue may see up to 100% of their users affected.
Incident Start Time: Monday, June 23, 2014, at 12:00 PM UTC
Preliminary Root Cause: A portion of network infrastructure which routes network traffic was in a degraded state.

Problem: Worldwide system outage for 8+ hours. Customers were unable to login to Lync and unable to access voicemail for 8 hrs and 45 minutes.

Percentage of Customers Impacted: 100%

Solution: The problem was reportedly fixed at 11:14pm UTC.

Root Cause: Still unknown.

Office 365 Exchange Online Outage Today

Today Microsoft Exchange had an email outage that impacted 100% of the users. Luckily, I do not use Exchange Online for email but I can only imagine how businesses around the world were impacted by this email outage for over 6 hours.

Microsoft notification in my Office 365 had this to say.

Jun 24, 2014 1:11 PM
Current Status: Engineers have mitigated impact by rerouting traffic away from the degraded capacity. Mail flow is now improving, and customers will begin to see service recovery as messages are being delivered and email queues drain.
Customer Impact: Affected customers were unable to send and receive messages sent through the Exchange Online Protection service. This affected inbound messages from external senders as well as sending to external recipients. Additionally, customers running in a hybrid scenario with on-premise mailboxes and those in the Office 365 cloud may have seen mail delays.
Percent of Users Affected: Customers experiencing this issue may have seen all of their users affected.
Incident Start Time: Tuesday, June 24, 2014, at 1:10 PM UTC
Incident End Time: Tuesday, June 24, 2014, at 7:30 PM UTC
Preliminary Root Cause: A limited portion of capacity within the Exchange Online service was impacting Exchange Online Protection traffic. The underlying root cause is under investigation.

Problem: Worldwide email outage for 6 hours and 20 minutes.

Percentage of Customers Impacted: 100%

Solution: The problem was reportedly fixed at 7:30pm UTC.

Root Cause: Still unknown.

It is unfortunate to see these problems with Microsoft Office 365, which is a great solution for small businesses and I am excited about its potential.

Office 365 Ongoing Billing Problems

These problems are in addition to all the billing issues that are facing Microsoft Office 365. I have been receiving emails from Office 365 Billing that my account will be charged (and they have), despite the fact that my account was closed 3 months ago, Microsoft has deleted my account and I have confirmation emails to prove it. Apparently Microsoft Office 365 Billing department is having a very difficult time controlling its billing system and is unable to prevent these messages from going out and is unable to stop charging customers without their permission.

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