Resolved -
Microsoft report the issue as "largely resolved" now. Their latest update is:
"We’ve a high level of confidence that the incident is largely resolved. Access to Microsoft Defender for Office, Microsoft Purview, and DNS functionality has been restored, and Exchange Online mail flow remains stable. We're continuing to fine tune load balancing adjustments and closely monitor the impact of recent changes to support sustained recovery. While recovery efforts remain ongoing, we are methodically addressing the small number of remaining affected services to ensure full service stability."
We are also seeing the "pending" email back-logs clear up on various third-party services for messages sending to MS365 domains.
Jan 23, 16:45 AEDT
Monitoring -
Most recent update from Microsoft:
"We’ve identified elevated service load combined with temporary capacity constraints during maintenance resulted in impact. We’re seeing positive signs of recovery in mail delivery, and mitigation actions are in place to better manage service load. While some connectivity impact remains between Microsoft Defender for Office, Microsoft Purview, and Exchange Online, and DNS lookup failures, engineers are actively working to restore full functionality."
Microsoft are posting updates on the incident every 15 minutes now. We are seeing some positive results already though with a lot of issues already starting to clear.
Jan 23, 15:48 AEDT
Update -
Microsoft are still experiencing service degradation on several MS 365 services especially in North America.
Their most recent update is: "We’re refining our load balancing efforts to optimize performance and reduce potential impact. In parallel, we’re assessing alternative solutions to reinforce recovery and enhance long term stability."
This is having some intermittent and patchy impact here in Australia, particularly for customers who use additional email protection who may see "delivery delayed" notifications on some emails. It also seems to be affecting some automation work-flows (MS Power Automate, MS Fabric and MS PowerBI).
We hope to hear of resolution soon and are still monitoring updates from Microsoft. If you have any concerns you'd like to clear up please let us know.
Jan 23, 13:26 AEDT
Investigating -
Users may be seeing degraded service functionality or be unable to access multiple Microsoft 365 services
User impact: Users may be seeing degraded service functionality or be unable to access multiple Microsoft 365 services.
More info: Users may be receiving a "451 4.3.2 temporary server issue" error message when attempting to send or receive email through Outlook.
Some of the impacted service functions include, but may not be limited to:
- Sending and receiving email
- Searching within SharePoint or Microsoft OneDrive.
- Accessing the service portals, such as the Microsoft 365 admin center.
- Creating chats, meetings, teams, channels or adding members in Microsoft Teams.
- Receiving presence or location information in Microsoft Teams.
- Applying and managing sensitivity labels, interactive operations on reports, and artifacts with sensitivity labels in Microsoft Fabric.
Current status: Microsoft say that they have restored the affected infrastructure to a heathy state but further work is required to mitigate persistent impact. They've identified and are implementing additional actions to achieve withstanding recovery.
Scope of impact: While MS reports this is mainly affecting the North America region we are seeing impacts in Australia on a few services. Compusult will continue to monitor this situation throughout the day.
Jan 23, 08:56 AEDT