Microsoft Login Failures Affecting Office 365 and Azure

On Monday, September 28th 2020, Microsoft had a failure with their authentication system that affected major products and services such as Office 365, Outlook, Teams, Sharepoint, Azure and many others. The Microsoft login failure affected consumer and business users that were not already authenticated with the Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) service. Microsoft confirmed the outage on their Azure Status Dashboard website.

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Our engineering team is currently working on new Application Performance Monitoring (APM) features to help IT teams monitor and troubleshoot availability and performance of Web SaaS services and perform a network assessment if anything performance degradation occurs. Many APM solutions on the market are available for developers and software operators but very few help IT teams monitor performance of SaaS applications.

In our lab, we have an APM Web test running on Microsoft Sharepoint. That test executes some of the steps a user would take to make sure the application is working properly. All the tests are executed inside a real Chrome web browser to make sure all the images, CSS and Javascript are downloaded and executed. If the end-users experience failures or application performance issues, the test will catch them and give the IT teams significant insights on the problems.

Starting at 21:25 UTC (17:25 EDT, 15:25 PDT), the Microsoft authentication service stopped working. Below is a screenshot of our APM Web feature (currently in beta) that clearly shows the failure of the Microsoft Sharepoint test.

The Microsoft login failure stopped around 00:03 UTC (20:03 EDT, 17:03 PDT) from our point of view, but according to Microsoft, it probably ended around 00:23 UTC. With distributed SaaS systems, it's important to test from the end-user point-of-view to make sure you catch and monitor from the same network and application path that your users are using.

This new Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Web feature is available to some customers during it's final development stage. If you are interested in trying out the new solution for yourself, contact us and we will include you in the beta program!

We also a have other articles about:

• How to monitor Microsoft network connectivity for Teams, Office 365, and Azure
• Microsoft Cloud Monitoring
• How to Detect Microsoft Teams Outages

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