Microsoft Outlook Outage Disrupts US Companies and Local Governments
A Microsoft Outlook outage that began around 1 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday, November 12, disrupted email, calendar, video conferencing and cloud storage services used by companies and local governments across the United States. Microsoft Outlook began to resume normal operations on Friday morning, according to The Guardian.
Microsoft's public status page reported service degradation affecting Microsoft 365 business and enterprise customers, as well as its consumer products. The company said users may be unable to connect to several Microsoft 365 services. It posted the information on the public page because administrators may have been unable to reach the Microsoft 365 admin center, where service health details are normally found.
The effects reached government offices and public services. A detention facility in Arapahoe County, Colorado, could not accept online bond payments. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department reported disruptions to its email and other communications platforms. In Fredericksburg and Gillespie County, Texas, emergency management services were unable to receive emails. The Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission, a water and sewer utility serving parts of Maryland, warned that technicians may be delayed and that customers may have trouble paying their water bills.
Schools were affected as well. Districts in Richmond, Virginia, and Port Washington, New York, reported outages on Friday morning. The Albany school district said it had restored its email service. The Colorado School of Mines encouraged faculty to be flexible with assignment deadlines because Microsoft tools were unavailable.
Some of the artificial intelligence tools that depend on Microsoft services were also affected. Anthropic's Claude said it was starting to see signs of recovery from the outage, but warned that some users may still receive errors. OpenAI said it was investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors, the links that allow outside apps to work with Microsoft accounts, where new connections may be broken.
