Microsoft Outlook, Teams Outage Detected by Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX)

On November 25, 2024, at 12:25 p.m. PDT, Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX) detected a significant and sudden decline in the ZDX Score for Microsoft Outlook and Teams services. Our analysis revealed application response issues for Microsoft Outlook and Teams services, indicating a Microsoft outage. The ZDX heatmap vividly showed the concentration of the impact. This observation aligns with a Microsoft post on X .

ZDX found a Microsoft outage and its cause. This made our customers feel safe that the problem was centered around the application, which prevented business disruptions and overwhelming IT teams.

ZDX dashboard showing the Microsoft outage

ZDX enables customers to proactively identify and quickly isolate service issues, giving IT teams confidence in the root cause, reducing mean time to resolve (MTTR) and first response time (MTTD).

The ZDX Incident Dashboard includes ML models to detect problems in applications, Wi-Fi, Zscaler data centers, last mile and intermediate ISP, and the endpoint, with automated AI-powered correlation. The dashboard includes incidents that have occurred in the last two weeks, with details on who was impacted, when, and where.

The Incidents Dashboard below captured the issue across the entire data path and identified the outage as an "application" issue. In the incident details page, you can drill down to further understand the area of impact, epicenter, who is affected, and where.

ZDX Score highlights Microsoft outage

Visible on the ZDX admin portal dashboard, the ZDX Score represents all users in an organization across all applications, locations, and cities on a scale of 0 to 100, with the low end indicating a poor user experience. Depending on the time and filters selected in the dashboard, the score will adjust accordingly.

The dashboard shows that the ZDX Score for the Microsoft probes dropped to Okay and Poor during the outage window of about 24 hours. From within ZDX, service desk teams can easily see that ‌service isn't just bad for one place or user. They can quickly start looking into the cause of the problem.

Also in the ZDX dashboard, "Web Probe Metrics" highlight the user impact of reaching Microsoft across a timeline with response times. In this case, the server responded with HTTP 404 and 503 response codes, showing there was an issue with Microsoft services.

ZDX dashboard showing Microsoft issues (times in GMT)

ZDX can quickly identify the root cause of user experience issues with AI-powered root-cause analysis . This saves IT teams the time of looking through broken data and fixing problems. This helps speed up the solution and keep employees working.

With a simple click in the ZDX dashboard, you can analyze a score, and ZDX will provide insight into potential issues. In the case of this Microsoft outage, ZDX highlights that the application is not reachable.

ZDX AI-powered root-cause analysis reveals the reason for the outage

It's clear that the application was the fundamental problem. The AI-powered root-cause analysis confirmed that the issue originated at the application level. IT teams can further confirm this by reviewing the Cloud Path metrics from the user to the destination.

ZDX Cloud Path showing full end-to-end data path

ZDX's AI-powered analysis and alerts help IT teams quickly tell the difference between good and bad user experiences. It does this by setting smart alerts for changes in performance metrics. ZDX lets IT teams compare metrics at different times to highlight issues quickly. It helps teams see the difference between good and bad user experiences by showing different things in application, network, and device metrics.

Microsoft posted a message on the X platform revealing an issue where users may be unable to access Microsoft Outlook and Teams services. This problem was resolved by 12:07 p.m. PDT, aligning with the ZDX data mentioned. Microsoft's services began to show signs of recovery shortly thereafter.

Source: Microsoft

ZDX alerting lets our customers know about problems before they happen. From a single dashboard, customers could quickly find the problem as a Microsoft issue instead of an internal network outage. This saves valuable IT resources.

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ZDX lets IT teams view digital experiences from the user's point of view. This improves performance and quickly solves problems with applications, networks, and devices.

Get in touch with us to discover how ZDX can benefit your organization.

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