Microsoft Office 365 Exchange issues for users across Europe Microsoft customers across Europe are reporting problems connecting to Exchange Online, including an inability to connect as well as time lags. "We are investigating connectivity issues to Exchange Online for some customers in Europe," Microsoft admitted this morning. Meanwhile, users took to Twitter to gripe. Office 365 …
Well fair enough, though I do think anybody posting an O365 availability gag should declare the availability achieved on their own on-prem service for the last five years .... partly in the interest of balance, partly because I'll swear I'm some where on the spectrum and that sort of pointless attention to detail calms my restless mind.
Paris, because that's were you can't get your email this morning.
To be honest, I'm only running a tiny little place here (a prep school) but:
Better than 1 day of downtime a year in the last few years (in fact, I'd say about 48 hours total over those years over 4-5 incidents).
Now I'm not running any number of seriously major services, but I have websites, databases, 100's of people accessing information 24/7, remote desktops, in-house desktops, hundreds of mobile devices, email, etc. etc. etc.
The day of downtime is usually only "the power is going off" (notification from the electricity board) and it's usually a Saturday (so not at all critical).
Achieving decent uptime isn't difficult. GUARANTEEING it is incredibly difficult. I couldn't, at any point, have GUARANTEED we'd be up the next day to any serious extent. The leased lines aren't THAT reliable. The servers might well fall over. I could easily fudge the network config and take things down. Microsoft could de-activate all my servers. There's a range of things outside my reasonable control as just an IT department.
But *achieving* better rates than that isn't difficult. Does that give me place to trash-talk MS? In jest, sure. In all seriousness, no, we're in entirely different businesses with entirely different requirements.
What irks me, though, is companies complaining about 365 Exchange downtime when they don't have any other kind of backup. Is it not possible to have a local Exchange server work in collaboration with the 365 Exchange to ensure you're up even when it's down? Or to failover your MX to the secondary mail for your domain? I thought this was the first lesson in "enterprise IT", no?
Use 365/Azure, by all means. But there's nothing stopping you having backups, alternatives, failovers, secondaries etc. to keep yourself running.
Complaining that your single points of failure are down is really a show that you didn't specify the system well enough to start.
@Lee D
In short, not that I know of. We're currently running a hybrid Exchange and even that doesn't help with this kind of outage. We have one user still to migrate, but as it's the boss's wife it's easier to wait until she's in the office than try and catch her between business trips and holidays.
We took the plunge to go hosted 365 for a very simple reason, and even with all the issues today that reason is still valid. We have some very mobile users. By which I mean they travel to China on frequent business trips and for some reason there's always been one who cannot get their emails when abroad. The switch to O365 has meant that they no longer need to VPN into the business to collect emails, something which has always been a bit of an issue due to Chinese hotels running their own VPNs.
"Well fair enough, though I do think anybody posting an O365 availability gag should declare the availability achieved on their own on-prem service for the last five years"
That's fair enough.
My email server has been available, in the last 3 years of its existence, all but 2 of those days.
"availability achieved on their own on-prem service for the last five years"
My On-Prem mailbox availability has averaged 365.2 days per year since 2012-09-18. That is, I have not had a single day when the users were unable to access their email in five years.
Yes, I'm proud of that. No, I'm not taking it for granted. If we're going to punish me, we can drop it to maybe 365.1 days and accept that there's maybe been a half day in total when the Transport Hub has stalled on a machine and has needed a swift kick to resume committing messages to the Information Store.
I'm generally fairly generous and call it Office 358. After all, everyone needs a week off from time to time.
Of all the on-premises servers that I look after, the worst two down times were
a: 3 hours for HDD failure on a server that is 8 years old (22.5 minutes per year average downtime)
b: 2.5 hours (mostly traveling to site) for a failed PSU - that server is 7 years old (21.43 minutes per year average downtime)
Both servers are still running perfectly. OK, so I'm not including out of hours reboots for updates, but I don't have customers with Microsoft's budget for failover servers etc.......
So much for the resilience of the cloud!
To be fair to MS their actual mail servers are still up and running. This is more like the switch the server is plugged into having an issue and not routing the traffic correctly. So from that perspective we shouldn't be just looking at server downtime, but also network downtime. And lets face it, anyone who's used Virgin Media will know how painful it is when an entire network decides it doesn't want to play anymore.
Maybe Microsoft's bit barns aren't that bad and network congestion is contributing to the poor service levels frequently observed. Can anybody explain to me why dull entertainment ought to be streamed via the Internet when there is ample bandwidth available via traditional TV channels (cable/satellite) ? And there is even the offline alternative of using CD's and DVD's - nice bandwidth achieved by walking to the next store, and good for health as well ...
http://downdetector.com/status/office-365/archive
Says 27 but I'm not so sure.
I gave up counting a long time ago.
It won't be long before they rename it with a new logo.
Can I suggest "Office Cloud" then they can explain away any outages as weather phenomenon?
Ah, the joys of the uptime on the "cloud".
Please do not mistake the "cloud" with Slurp's offering ... it has nothing to do with the offering of other players in the "cloud" arena. I mean, Slurp have had downtime every month since January, except for the pause over August, guess they froze the system with the many personal leaves (holiday makers)...
My personal guess ? Office 365 Exchange servers are being patched .... those 5 reboots do take their toll ...
Title: Can't connect to Exchange Online
User Impact: Users may have been unable to connect to the Exchange Online service.
Final status: After a period of monitoring the service, we can confirm that rerouting traffic restored availability.
Scope of impact: This issue could have potentially affected any of your users intermittently if they were routed through the affected infrastructure.
Start time: Monday, September 18, 2017, at 7:20 AM UTC
End time: Monday, September 18, 2017, at 10:00 AM UTC
Preliminary root cause: A subset of mailbox infrastructure became degraded, causing impact to availability.
Next steps:
- We're analyzing performance data and trends on the affected systems to help prevent this problem from happening again.
This is the final update for the event.
What is so strange about this whole "cloud" thing is that it can be broken and nobody in the C-suite appears to give a toss. If the same thing happened on-prem then everyone would be running around like blue-arsed flies wanting it fixed.
The disparity between what is acceptable on-prem and in the cloud given that they are supposed to be delivering the same service is an indication of the skill of the cloudy sale people at selling snake oil.
Not sure if you have a say, where I work, I do not have a say when it comes to productivity software ...
If your business chose Office 319, the worst performer in cloud to date ... that EVEN if we say Azure was launched on Jan 1 2017 ... regardless of metrics .... lets take days downtime of any component, Azure Jan 1 2017 to date fares less well than Amazon AWS in the period March 2006 to Sept 2017 ... YES, 9 months compared to 11 years!
Same for Google, IBM, YES, AND Oracle ... you name it, Slurp has had more downtime than any other provider ... I have not checked, but I guess Slurp has had more down time than ALL OTHER MAJOR CLOUDY PROVIDERS EVER COMBINED, all that in 2017 alone!
That, and Azure is widely used, #2 cloudy choice ... go figure ... I know corporate policies etc, etc, etc ... Hello, Windows Cleaners and Surface Experts, anybody in ?
Seriously, 46 days of down time, without counting ~6* weeks of downtime logging into Office "365" with Firefox ...
* approx 6 weeks as I did not try every week ... grew tired after 3 weeks of trying daily...
This has been a total PITA for us today. Hardly any mailflow at all for 1,400 staff.
We all told the IT director 4yrs ago it would be a bad idea to get rid of our Exchange cluster. Which we owned with perpetual licenses...
But oh no, got to go with this new fangled Cloud hosting, because its what all the big boys are doing..
Ughhhhh...
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