Last week 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.
These frequent requests during Microsoft service outages have compelled us to find a way to proactively inform the admins when any outage occurs. During our research, we have found that nestled in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, there is an option to email up to 2 email addresses when any incident or advisory occurs for any of these services:
| · Exchange Online |
| · Azure Information Protection |
| · Dynamics 365 |
| · Dynamics 365 Business Central |
| · Finance and Operations Apps |
| · Identity Service |
| · Microsoft 365 suite |
| · Microsoft Bookings |
| · Microsoft Defender ATP |
| · Microsoft Forms |
| · Microsoft Intune |
| · Microsoft Kaizala |
| · Microsoft Power Automate |
| · Microsoft Power Automate in Microsoft 365 |
| · Microsoft StaffHub |
| · Microsoft Stream |
| · Microsoft Teams |
| · Mobile Device Management for Office 365 |
| · Office Client Applications |
| · Office for the web |
| · OneDrive for Business |
| · Planner |
| · Power Apps |
| · Power Apps in Microsoft 365 |
| · Power BI |
| · Project for the web |
| · Project Online |
| · SharePoint Online |
| · Skype for Business |
| · Sway |
| · Yammer Enterprise |
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Each administrator has their own preferences regarding what incident or advisory they would like to be alerted on, and the limit of two emails is per administrator, not per tenant.
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To enable this feature, follow these steps:
- Log in to Microsoft 365 Admin Center via https://portal.office.com
- Select Health and then Service Health on the left-hand blade.
- Click Preferences
- 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.
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.
For more information please email [email protected]
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