In the past few weeks Microsoft observed another Microsoft 365 service outage leaving many of our clients unable to access multiple, if not all the Microsoft 365 services.  During the outage, our service desk received numerous tickets inquiring about the status of the outage and where these organizations can find the latest update regarding the service.  We always refer our clients to review the latest status update via https://status.office.com.  This site will inform any user of any known issues that could be preventing them from signing into their Office 365 service dashboard.

There is an option to email up to 2 email addresses when any incident or advisory occurs for any Microsoft Service in the Admin->Service Health

To enable this feature, follow these steps:

  1. Log in to Microsoft 365 Admin Center via https://portal.office.com
  2. Select Health and then Service Health on the left-hand blade.
  3. Click Preferences
    1. In the Preferences pop-out, click Email at the top, check off Send me email notifications about service health, enter up to 2 email addresses, include what type of issues you want to be informed proactively about, lastly select which services you need updates about, and click save.

  5. Once enabled, we expect anywhere from 24 to 48 hours for the feature to be replicated throughout all the Microsoft services.  Notifications should begin to arrive soon after Microsoft announces that an incident or advisory has been exposed, but this could be some time after the end-users report observing the issue.  Microsoft must first investigate the issue prior to reporting in the service health that an issue exists.  Once an incident or advisory has occurred Microsoft will update the service on an hourly cadence or, if a different cadence is needed, it will be stated in the Service Health Dashboard communication posting.