The World According to Mitch

I have been using Microsoft Office365 to manage my e-mail since the beta program, and last month purchased the full program for SWMI Consulting Group.  Office365 includes, among so much more, the mail service in a cloud (Exchange 2010).  I have had few complaints – someone else manages it for me, and I can focus on my business.

This afternoon my e-mail went down for a couple of hours.  It is easy to detect if you are looking – the indicator at the bottom of the Microsoft Outlook client changed from Connected to Microsoft Exchange to Disconnected. I tried to connect to the Outlook Web Access site, but got a 503 Error.

At the same time I noticed several of my friends and colleagues on Twitter complaining of the same sort of outage, and not sure what to do.  Fortunately I have been down this road before, and knew just what to do.

I logged onto the Office365 Portal Page (https://portal.microsoftonline.com) and clicked on Admin along the top.  Along the left there is a Support link for Service Health.  The Service Health screen gives the current status of all of the services, and the one-week history.  The screen had a lot of green checkmarks, but under E-Mail and calendar access under Today was a red flag (seen below).

The red flag was a hyperlink, so when I clicked on it there was a three minute old notice that there was an open incident, that the status was Investigating, and the details said: ‘We are investigating a service issue and will provide updated information when it becomes available.’

I kept my eyes on this screen, and watched the progress. Over the course of the next couple of hours or so I was able to get my e-mail and my calendar.  It was fortunate, because people had told me to expect e-mails – and there were several outgoing e-mails waiting to be sent out.  Because of these communications I knew what was going on, and that it was being dealt with.  I continued along with my day.