Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 & Power Platform Incident Readiness - Unified

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When a Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 or Power Platform incident is declared, we send updates to all impacted tenants to provide visibility and relevant guidance.

Sometimes we may need to notify you of issues occurring in your managed environment, where an admin or user in your organization may need to take action to resolve. These communications will appear in Service health under the section titled “Issues in your environment that require action”.

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Before an incident

We recommend the following steps to be prepared and help protect your organization:

Prepare for incidents

  1. Learn how to use administrator roles to assign permissions and establish admins within your organization.

    • Service health communications are limited to certain admin roles. Assign admin roles that have permission to view Service health and review them regularly to stay current on the latest Service health information.
    • Assign a Message center privacy reader admin in your tenant to ensure the right people are receiving email notifications relating to security and privacy incidents.

  2. Get familiar with Service health within the Microsoft 365 admin center – your "go to" place to receive updates.

  3. Get familiar with the Message center within the Microsoft 365 admin center, for Security and Privacy related communications.

  4. Consider leveraging the service communications API in Microsoft Graph to tailor incident awareness to your organization’s needs.

  5. Increase the security of your organization by enforcing Multi-Factor Authentication to alleviate concerns about exposure.

During an Incident

When your organization is impacted by an incident, it is important that you know where and how to find the relevant communications surrounding the incident:

  1. For service incidents, review Service Health in the Microsoft 365 admin center for the latest updates from our engineers for service incidents.

  2. If your issue is not represented in Service health, use the "report an issue" feature to notify Microsoft that you're experiencing an issue with a service.

  3. For security and privacy incidents, review Message Center in Microsoft 365 admin center while logged in as a Global admin or Message center privacy admin, for the latest available information. Be on the lookout for actions that must be carried out by your organization.

  4. If Service health is unavailable, refer to the Service Health Status page or @MSFT365Status on "X" (formerly Twitter).

Why use Service Health instead of status.office.com?

The status.cloud.com page is only used when an active service issue is preventing customers from accessing the Microsoft 365 admin center or its Service Health functionality, so this public page should be considered a backup notification page.

Service Health (within the Microsoft 365 admin center) knows which tenants you manage, so it shows a much more accurate view of any known issues impacting your services.

When is it useful to open a support case?

If the issue is already being communicated via Service health, all the latest information will be provided here, and there is no need to open a support request.

If you believe you’re impacted by a service incident, but do not see the issue represented in the Service health page, you can report an issue from the Service health section in the Microsoft 365 admin center, or you can open a support request.

After an incident

At the conclusion of the event, we’ll provide a final root cause, and outline steps that we’re taking to prevent the issue from happening again.

If you're still experiencing impact after some time has passed, you may be impacted by a separate event. You can notify Microsoft by selecting “Report an issue” on the main Service health page, or you may consider following your normal support process.

For certain events with unique impact, we’ll provide a post-incident report (PIR) within a few days of closure. The PIR will include extended information regarding root cause and next steps, as well as a detailed timeline of what transpired throughout the event.