Monitor Office 365 Outages with Twitter
Office 365 has high SLAs ( the latest English version ) backed by Microsoft’s excellent Azure Cloud. However, like every other cloud services, there is always the chance for something unexpected to happen. This year April Office 365 had a major hiccup to its service. Its Asia Pacific backend Azure AD authentication went haywire. As a result, users lost access all O365 services. To make it worse, the usual Office 365 monitoring channel: Office 365 dashboard was not accessible due to this fault. To track the issue at the time, I ended up relying on the official MS Twitter account @Office365Status for updates. The account contains all Office 365 service outage notifications. This made it become the only source for people to track the issue at that time. After the incident, it become obvious that the Twitter account is a pretty reliable source for monitoring Office 365 service status. Based on this, I developed a solution, it uses PowerShell script to check for new tweets from @Office365St