The Microsoft Outlook outage has shaken up companies and local governments across the US that use its suite of email, calendar, video conferencing and cloud storage systems.
Even as Outlook started to resume normal operations Friday morning, local leaders from across the country, including in Miami, Maryland and Los Angeles, warned residents that certain staff or services were still unavailable due to the outage that started around 1pm ET on Thursday.
In Colorado, one local detention facility in Arapahoe county said that they were unable to take online bond payments to release detainees because of the outage.
“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 warned that it was experiencing disruptions in 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.
Around Maryland, the Washington suburban sanitary commission, which provides safe drinking water and sewer treatment to parts of Maryland, said that its technicians may be delayed due to the outage, and some customers may have trouble making their water bill payments.
In Washington DC, congressional staffers continued to lament the outage’s impact during the lame duck session of Congress. Some told Politico that the disruptions were particularly disruptive as 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.
Some school districts in Richmond, Virginia, and Port Washington, New York, also 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 reach their child’s school, while the Albany school district said that 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 were on unaffected platforms such as Google Workspace and Canvas.
Claude, whose developer, Anthropic, is gearing up for its upcoming stock market debut with a valuation of up to $1.4tn, also said that it was starting to see signs of recovery from the Microsoft outages, but warned that some users may still receive errors. OpenAI also 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 was scheduled for Thursday afternoon because of the outage.
In a social media post, Microsoft executive Charles Lamanna said late Thursday that “there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity”.
On Friday morning, Microsoft noted “improvements in service availability” but noted that “some users may still experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as a recovery continues”.
By the end of the day, most of the issues seemed to be ironed out. Schools and businesses appeared to be coming back online, congressional staffers reported “improvements to Outlook’s functionality”. The Colorado detention facility said it is “now receiving email notifications when online bond payments are made”.
And the emergency management services in Texas said they were starting to see emails trickle back in, saying: “Thanks for your patience with the worldwide outage!”
Dara Kerr and Johana Bhuiyan contributed reporting
