Communication philosophy

We recognize the significance of effective communications during incidents and understand how critical they're to you. In our efforts to provide you with the right information at the right time, these five pillars that guide our communications strategy:

• Speed - Is it me or is it Azure?

  We want you to know it's us, not you as quickly as possible. This goal is our key objective. Our goal is to notify all affected subscriptions and tenants within 15 minutes of an outage.

  Due to the complexity of our platform, this approach can't be achieved with human beings alone. That fact is why we continue to invest in our AIOps technology.

• Accuracy - Which of my resources are impacted?

  We understand that when an incident causes impact, you need to know exactly which resources are affected. Using Resource Health signals and alerts, we're able to show you the health of your resources and which the incident affects.

• Discoverability - How can I be notified proactively?

  We encourage you to configure relevant notifications based on who needs to receive them and how they would best be notified.

• Parity - How can I standardize operations across services?

  We aim to standardize operations and achieve consistency across Azure services. This approach provides consistent experiences across our service health communication types. The approach harmonizes the Microsoft cloud ecosystem for a more seamless experience.

• Transparency - What really happened?

  We think of transparency as a DIAL and not a SWITCH. We know that to build trust in the cloud, we need to be transparent with you. Transparent about what happened, transparent about where our failings were and what we're doing about it, and transparent about what you could have done to avoid this incident.