It's the end of support for Office 2021 LTSC and it seems like Microsoft is celebrating with a Microsoft 365 outage for some European customers. The affected service is Global Secure Access (GSA), which customers use to access services including Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint Online, Teams, and Windows 365 Cloud PCs. We'd argue the "365" moniker is perhaps a little inaccurate at this point. According to Microsoft, the cause is: "A section of GSA infrastructure is performing below acceptable performance thresholds, affecting connectivity to Microsoft 365 services and resulting in impact." The company is applying traffic and performance optimizations, and the system is now showing signs of life, which is scant comfort for customers who have struggled to access Microsoft 365 services using GSA. The timing is unfortunate, since it coincides with the end of support for Office LTSC 2021, Microsoft's on-premises version of Office. The company would like customers to migrate to Microsoft 365, though on-premises Office LTSC 2024 is also available if the cloud doesn't tickle their fancy. It's not yet clear what caused the latest outage. Microsoft is having to report status updates on its Service Health Status page because, according to the company, "Microsoft 365 administrators may be unable to access the admin center to get Service health information." We checked, and, above the cheery text, "Great! No active issues," is a message that reads: "We are having trouble getting info about your service incidents, advisories, and history right now. Try again in a few minutes." Enterprises have already decided whether to stick with on-premises Office, move to the cloud, or choose something else altogether. While Office 2021 LTSC won't suddenly stop working, the end of support from Microsoft will require customers to take some action for compliance reasons, if nothing else. Those who have taken the leap to Microsoft 365 will be pondering the wisdom of their move as Microsoft has demonstrated, yet again, that its cloud services are not quite as reliable as customers might hope or need, and an "oops, sorry about that" only goes so far where a loss of productivity is concerned. ®

Microsoft took down the Exchange Admin Center (EAC) today after a code change left administrators facing an "Internal Server Error" when trying to access the service. Microsoft first admitted that something was amiss at 0937 UTC on October 12, noting, "When attempting to access the Exchange admin center, affected admins may encounter an 'Internal Server Error' message." Any administrator attempting to access the EAC could be affected. It was more than an hour before the company stated: "We've identified unexpected 302 redirect errors during affected Exchange admin center (EAC) access attempts and are analyzing diagnostic logs to isolate the source of the access failures. "While we continue our investigation, admins remain unable to access the EAC, with no workaround currently available." So, a fun morning for Microsoft's European users. According to Microsoft, the EAC is "a modern, web-based management console for managing Exchange Online." Want to manage mailboxes? EAC is where you go. Group management? Again, EAC. Microsoft explained: "The design of the EAC in Exchange Online aligns with the overall Microsoft 365 admin experience." Sadly, that alignment appears to extend to service wobbles caused by changes rolled out without due care and attention. Two hours after admitting things had gone awry, Microsoft said it was "continuing to test the rollback of the recent Exchange admin center (EAC) change while monitoring the results to determine if this resolves the impact." At this point, administrators were nodding sagely at an all-too familiar story. Of course rolling back the change did the trick. Microsoft stated as much in its final update: "A recent EAC configuration change resulted in unexpected HTTP responses within the affected request path, preventing admins from successfully accessing the EAC. "Reverting the identified change restored expected service functionality." Microsoft also assured customers it was reviewing the change to ensure it didn't make the same mistake again, as well as its monitoring and telemetry, to "improve detection and alerting for similar service behavior." The problem is that this is hardly a new phenomenon. In September, Microsoft made a configuration change that left some users unable to access SharePoint Online sites and pages. In April, another ill-thought-through change took down Outlook for iOS. And, in 2025, Microsoft 365 tumbled from the cloud because of yet another configuration change. It's almost as if testing changes consists of little more than asking Copilot, "does this look alright to you?" and then hitting the go button. The latest outage was resolved before the end of the working day, and a preliminary Post-Incident Report is due within two business days, with a final report due next week. Hopefully one or the other will contain words along the lines of "Hey, this keeps happening, maybe we should do some more testing before deploying to production?" ®