Unfortunately, Microsoft and Office 365 suffered their second major outage of the year and this one was even bigger than the first. We say “unfortunately” because even though our business is to help monitor cloud and SaaS services and our business goes up when there are problems, we don’t wish an outage on any cloud provider. Operating a SaaS business at the scale of Microsoft Office 365 is a herculean task and that’s why they get paid the big bucks.

DNS, the Domain Name Service, is the Internet service that translates IP addresses into hostnames, and visa versa. It enables you to type www.exoprise.com in a browser, or send an email to someone at that domain, and have your request actually go to 35.172.52.247. As a vital part of the Internet infrastructure, DNS attacks can have a serious impact on your online operations, including access to your website and email.

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) is one of the most insidious types of digital attacks that can cause cloud outages. It is typically directed at a specific target, and if done competently, can bring an application or even all network traffic to its knees.

Microsoft is making it both convenient and cost-effective to use the SaaS cloud-based Office 365 and Azure cloud services rather than a locally hosted Office, SharePoint and their respective on-premises services. However, there can be outages due to a variety of reasons. Network issues, both local and Internet-based, data center problems, malicious activity, and environmental conditions can all cause outages.