Some local services stayed offline Friday as Outlook recovered
The outage reached jail operations, water utilities, schools and Congress. In Colorado, the Arapahoe county detention facility said the failure of Outlook left it unable to process online bond payments. “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 said it was experiencing disruptions to its email and other communications platforms. Emergency management services in Fredericksburg and Gillespie county in Texas said they were unable to receive emails and encouraged 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 and that some customers could have trouble making water bill payments. Local officials in Miami, Maryland and Los Angeles warned residents Friday morning that certain staff or services were still unavailable.
Congressional staffers described the disruption arriving at an awkward moment. Some told Politico that the outages were particularly disruptive because their offices were negotiating pending legislation before the end of the year and planning for the next Congress, during the lame duck session. “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.
School districts moved to phone lines and alternative platforms. Districts in Richmond, Virginia, and Port Washington, New York, told parents on Friday morning that they were experiencing outages and asked them to reach schools by phone or through other online educational platforms; 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”, even though many of its systems ran on unaffected platforms such as Google Workspace and Canvas.
The ripple effects reached beyond Microsoft’s own products. Claude, whose developer Anthropic is gearing up for an 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 warned that some users might 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 Q3 earnings call that had been set for Thursday afternoon because of the outage.
Microsoft addressed the cause late Thursday. In a social media post, executive Charles Lamanna said “there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity”. By Friday morning, the company noted “improvements in service availability” while cautioning that “some users may still experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as a recovery continues”.