Great news for Office 365 administrators!

The Office 365 team announced that they’ve made some major improvements to their response to service incidents in Office 365. While these types of issues are of course undesirable, at least the upgraded communication helps admins identify the problem so they can be on their way to troubleshooting.

Below is a summary of the updates that came with this announcement. For more details, check out the Office blog.

• More details, more frequent status updates, and faster post-incident analyses were added to the Service Health Dashboard. (How to check the Service Health Dashboard.)
• New “intelligent error messages” inform users if a service incident is interrupting their access to SharePoint Online, with more Office 365 workloads to be supported in the coming months.
• If you’re creating a service request, and there’s a related service incident happening, a message will alert you that the team is already aware of the issue and working to fix it.
• The Office 365 Admin app for Windows Phone, iOS, and Android devices provides new service incident push notifications.
• The Office 365 Service Communications API is now available in public preview, so you can surface service communications with existing help desk and service management tools. Some third-party companies like BetterCloud are already using this API.