Exchange Online Control Panel - Terribly Slow Performance

[Andrew Colombino]

The last few times I've had to change something in the Exchange Online Admin Center/Control Panel, I've experienced performance issues:

• Pages take a long time to load and the sub-grids take even longer to populate.
• I occasionally receive error messages that say, "Service is busy" or "500 - Unexpected Error" (see attached).
• Status bar of pop-up windows says, "Waiting for outlook.office365.com..." indefinitely.

I've tried several browsers (Edge, Chrome, etc.) and performance is comparable. Other admin centers (Azure, etc.) move along just fine; this seems to be specific to Exchange.

Does anyone else have this issue? My company is on Office 365 E3 licenses. We were early adopters of Office 365 (BPOS days), and I'm wondering if that is having any negative impact on us.

It's extremely frustrating when I need to change one setting and I have to come back later because it's so slow.

[#2]

Hey ANdrew,

In my old job i was in the O365 admin center every single day all day long.

Two thoughts:
1 - this just happens sometime, and when it was that way it was always very frustrating. I feel you, and its frustrating to have to sit there waiting for stuff to load. Just bear with it, they normally would have stuff running smoothly later on in the same day by providing more resourcing.

2 - Sometimes I would have issues with all my cached information getting in the way. It sounded like you have already done some stuff to test this out (with different browsers for instance), but I always when it got real bad would switch to an incognito chrome browser just to be safe.

Realistically though, you are correct and sometimes its just slow, but again they almost always get resourcing to smooth it out, you must have just happened to hit it at peak times/peak load the last few times.

Adam

[#3]

Also Powershell is never slow, so if you are comfortable in there, that its always an option for a quick setting change!

[#4]

Thanks, Adam. I don't go in often enough or I'd probably leave a PowerShell window open all day!

The slowness has always been something that happened on and off, but getting the 500 errors and 'server busy' messages is a relatively new thing for me. Figured I'd shout out and see if this is becoming the new norm.

--Andrew

[#5]

To your point I have not personally gotten any 500 errors, so that may be worth digging into more, Has anyone else reading this been getting those?

[#6]

Yeah, I've seen others complain about this, some of my fellow MVPs even brought the subject in front of some Microsoft folks. The more evidence Microsoft has around such issues, the faster they will put the necessary resources into fixing them, so make sure to open a support case/report this.

And yes, as Adam mentioned, PowerShell is a good alternative, pretty much everything you do via the EAC runs PowerShell on the backend anyway.

[#7]

We see the same issue. Since the last two weeks it's also hard to start a Powershell session.