Question

Users at Contoso report intermittent delays sending email through Exchange Online. As the Microsoft 365 administrator, you open the Microsoft 365 admin center and go to Health > Service health. You see an active entry for Exchange Online classified as 'Advisory' rather than 'Incident'. Management asks you what this classification indicates so they can decide how to communicate with staff. What should you tell them?

Accepted Answer

An advisory indicates a problem that may affect some users but where the service remains largely usable, often with a workaround, whereas an incident means a critical service outage or degradation.

Answer

An advisory means Microsoft has confirmed a full service outage and is actively restoring the service for all tenants.

Answer

An advisory is a notification that a planned maintenance window will occur and no users are currently affected.

Answer

An advisory indicates the issue was reported only by your tenant and has not yet been acknowledged by Microsoft.