Microsoft celebrates end of Office 2021 LTSC with MS 365 outage

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. (R)