One we refer to as the Office 365 MDM, which is a basic MDM engine native to the original Office 365 product, and the second is Intune, which is a full device management platform that is a premium offering with additional capabilities. Historically, there have been two separate MDM engines available in Office 365. On modern iOS devices the email profile is configured through the use of an email managing profile and certificate pushed to the device from the MDM engine via the Company Portal app. The Mobile Device Management engine in Office 365 (MDM) is responsible for ensuring security and compliance for mobile devices connecting to Rutgers Connect but also for automatically provisioning the correct email profile in the native email apps when a user registers a device. We are attempting to communicate the essence of the issue we encountered, but skipping or smoothing some of the more complicated issues. This report attempts to make that information digestible by a broader but technical audience, and some simplification of the concepts is required.
Technical Background and Our Analysis of the Event:Īs you read this analysis, please keep in mind the Mobile Management software packages are very complex and involve many subtle intricacies dependent on multiple operating system versions, various hardware configurations, user privileges and compliance requirements, etc. This outage was not caused by any changes or configurations made by Rutgers Connect staff, it was not specific to Rutgers Connect, and it was not predictable or fixable by our team. The actual scope of the outage was provided to us under NDA, but we can share that it affected all customers served from a particular section of the Azure infrastructure. Rutgers Connect was not the only Microsoft Office 365 customer affected.
We have already provided our feedback to the vendor regarding this issue. Throughout the entire outage, the Rutgers Connect team was in contact with Microsoft Premier Support and the Microsoft engineering team. We tried to provide the best updates we could to the community. However, the information we had at the time was not always the most clear or accurate. This issue was first reported to us around 7 am on Tuesday, and it was resolved before 10 am on Wednesday, although some users may have been affected after that time as mobile devices were updating to server-side changes. No data was lost during this event-only access to it using the device-native applications.
The issue also seemed to affect iOS devices far more than Android devices due to the differences in which the two operating systems use the ActiveSync protocol. This outage did not affect any other means of access to Rutgers Connect, including all desktop tools, web access, Outlook Mobile app, or all other mobile applications related to Rutgers Connect.
At 11 am EST, 11/7, after additional verification steps, Microsoft declared the issue resolved and closed out the incident.īelow is a much more detailed technical review of last week's incident with Rutgers Connect and mobile devices.Īs you know, many Rutgers Connect users lost access to their Rutgers email, calendar, and contacts on their mobile devices last Tuesday and Wednesday (11/6 and 11/7). The affected devices had their email profiles removed, which resulted in a loss of access to email, calendar, and contacts.
Sometime during the night of Tuesday (11/6) and Wednesday (11/7) Microsoft deployed a new software build to the affected infrastructure correcting the source of the problem. Brief Summary: Sometime during the night of Monday (11/5) to Tuesday (11/6) Microsoft deployed a new software build to the Office 365 MDM infrastructure hosting Rutgers Connect.