Dealing with a cloud outage

Only a couple of hours ago Microsoft experienced an issue with the Exchange Online component of Office 365.
The issue was limited to the APAC region, and unfortunately did not affect every customer at the same time – so it was difficult to establish a common issue or pattern.
While not initially affected myself it was a short matter of time until both my Paradyne and Xstran mailboxes weren’t accessible.

What I noticed straight away is that the #office365 “channel” on Twitter was filled with many hateful comments.

While I am an advocate of Office 365 – I am also a customer and directly answerable to the many (MANY) customers I have helped moved to the cloud.

During the very short-lived outage I fielded a few calls from customers who were slightly concerned. Only one was annoyed, however when I put it in perspective they were actually quite happy.
To be quite blasé about it, I see Cloud solutions as someone else’s problem. In saying that I’m not simply wiping my hands clean of any responsibility – I am in fact delegating it to a company that created the products and has a global engineering and support workforce.

So when I spoke to my irritated customer I put it to them this way…
If they were running their own Exchange Server on-premise and had an issue they would have called their IT support provider (let’s say I don’t spruik Office 365 and instead sell on-premise solutions). In the best circumstances I might have been able to look at the issue straight away using remote access – but there would have been no guarantee of resolution. Were it a serious issue that required more investigation and escalation to engineers the customer may have been offline for even longer.
That isn’t even factoring in the potential of data loss and maybe having to restore the previous nights backup.
And depending on the support agreement in place the customer may have been potentially out of pocket to remediate the issue.

So comparing this to my now less irate customer on Office 365 with no access to email. They paid nothing extra for technical support, their mailboxes came back online after a short period, and nothing was lost.
Having that conversation really put it in perspective for them and their take was “wow, good thing we let Microsoft look after it for us!”.

As many of my readers/followers know I am rarely offline (except during those pesky hours where I have to sleep).
So what did I do while I couldn’t access my mailbox? I used Lync Online to keep communicating with people (staff, customers, partners). I kept working in documents SharePoint Online. I spoke to a few customers. I called my wife to see how her day was going.
Plus it gave me some time to work through my Inbox, queue up some replies and new emails which would send when I was able to connect to my mailbox again.

It’s easy to get upset when a service is offline. I completely understand the frustrations people had in that the service health dashboard wasn’t updated and that Telstra (syndication partner in Australia) was not answering every inbound call due to the influx. These are legitimate issues that both Microsoft and Telstra can learn from and continue to improve their services.

Was I frustrated that I couldn’t get to my mailbox? Slightly. I knew service would be restored at some point soon and that I could get on with other things.

Remember: a small mail outage is not the end of the world. Keep calm and carry on.