Generally, the cloud is pretty reliable. However, it is not perfect and there will be downtimes and outages. Just because you move your information to the cloud doesn’t mean that you abdicate your responsibilities for it. Disaster planning is as important in the cloud as it is on prem.
The first place to start if you are having issues with what you believe to be related to Microsoft 365 is the Microsoft 365 Service Health page shown above, which can be found at:
https://portal.office.com/adminportal/home#/servicehealth
Of course, if you are unable to access your tenant for any reason, then you’ll have to try another resource.
Your next point of call should be the Office 365 status page here and shown above:
This is fairly generic and also just links back to the Service Health in your own portal. However there maybe information here around any wider scale issues so it is always worthwhile checking.
Next, you should follow the @MSFT365Status Twitter account as shown above. Here you’ll find information posted that is on infrastructure outside Microsoft’s. You can also communicate with this account if you need to.
You can also find an Azure Status page at:
https://status.azure.com/en-us/status
Given that many Microsoft 365 services are built on Azure, it is another area that may give you some insight.
There is also an Azure support Twitter account @azuresupport that will post information concerning issues and something you can also interact with if you need to.
There are also numerous third party services that will track whether a web site active.
Finally, a good approach is also to do a search across Twitter to see whether others are also having similar issues. People tend to be pretty vocal on social media when they are inconvenienced, so that should a source of both good and bad information.
As Noah knows, you prepare for the flood BEFORE it rains. In the event of cloud issues, how will you know the extent of the issues and where will you get good information? For me, that source has typically been Twitter as the major source. You do have to filter those results a tad to get helpful information there, but that is the nature of social media.
In short, you need a plan. Take my advice and start monitoring Twitter to get a better idea of what might be happening beyond your own screen.
CIAOPS 