Microsoft Outlook outage disrupts businesses, schools and local governments across the US
Failures that began Thursday afternoon rippled through jails, water utilities, Congress and classrooms, with some services still recovering on Friday morning.
By Olga Menon ·
A sweeping outage of Microsoft's Outlook service disrupted companies, schools and local governments across the United States, knocking out the suite of email, calendar, video conferencing and cloud storage systems that many organizations depend on. Although the service began returning to normal on Friday morning, officials warned that some staff and services remained unavailable.
The outage started around 1pm ET on Thursday. By Friday, local leaders in places including Miami, Maryland and Los Angeles were still cautioning residents that certain staff or services were out of reach because of the disruption.
In Colorado, a detention facility in Arapahoe county said it could not process online bond payments for releasing detainees. "Until Outlook email is restored, anyone needing to post bond for immediate release must do so in person at the jail," the office said in a social media statement. The Los Angeles county sheriff's department also reported disruptions to its email and other communications platforms, while emergency management services in Fredericksburg and Gillespie county in Texas said they were unable to receive emails and urged residents and partners to call instead.
In Maryland, the Washington suburban sanitary commission, which provides safe drinking water and sewer treatment to parts of the state, said its technicians might be delayed because of the outage and that some customers could have trouble making their water bill payments.
In Washington DC, congressional staffers continued to voice frustration as the outage landed during the lame duck session of Congress. Some told Politico the disruptions were particularly difficult because their offices were in the middle of negotiating pending legislation before the end of the year and planning for the next Congress. "Shall we start conducting all official business via DM?" wrote Sharon Eliza Nichols, the director of communications for congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton of Washington DC.
Schools also felt the impact. Districts in Richmond, Virginia, and Port Washington, New York, told parents on Friday morning that they were experiencing outages and asked them to reach out by phone or through other online educational platforms to contact their children's schools. The Albany school district said it had restored its services. The Colorado School of Mines encouraged "faculty to be flexible with assignment deadlines and understanding of students who cannot complete assignments due to unavailability of Microsoft tools", though many of its systems run on unaffected platforms such as Google Workspace and Canvas.
The effects extended to the artificial intelligence sector. Claude, whose developer Anthropic is gearing up for its upcoming stock market debut with a valuation of up to $1.4tn, said it was starting to see signs of recovery from the Microsoft outages but cautioned that some users may still receive errors. OpenAI said it was still investigating issues with "Microsoft connectors" that were degrading performance. "We're investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors where new connections may be broken and tools are not working as expected. We'll share an update when we know more," the company said.
On Wall Street, Workhorse Group, an industrial manufacturer, rescheduled its third quarter earnings call, which had been set for Thursday afternoon, because of the outage.
In a social media post late Thursday, Microsoft executive Charles Lamanna said "there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity". On Friday morning, Microsoft noted "improvements in service availability" while warning that some users may still experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as a recovery continues.
