Microsoft Outlook outage, Digi Mart USA News: The Microsoft Outlook outage has disrupted companies and local governments across the US that rely on its suite of email, calendar, video conferencing and cloud storage systems. The outage started around 1pm ET on Thursday, according to the Guardian’s report.
Even as Outlook began resuming normal operations on Friday morning, local leaders in places including Miami, Maryland and Los Angeles warned residents that some staff and services remained unavailable. In Colorado, an Arapahoe county detention facility said it could not accept online bond payments, so people needing to post bond for immediate release had to do so in person at the jail.
The Los Angeles county sheriff’s department reported disruptions to its email and other communications platforms. Emergency management services in Fredericksburg and Gillespie county, Texas, said they could not receive emails and asked residents and partners to call instead.
The Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission, which provides drinking water and sewer treatment in parts of Maryland, said its technicians could be delayed and some customers might have trouble paying water bills.
In Washington DC, congressional staffers said the outage hampered work during the lame duck session, when offices were negotiating pending legislation and planning for the next Congress. Some school districts in Richmond, Virginia, and Port Washington, New York, reported outages on Friday morning and asked parents to contact schools by phone or other online platforms, while the Albany school district said its services had been restored.
Some organisations were less affected. The Colorado School of Mines encouraged faculty to be flexible with assignment deadlines, though many of its systems ran on platforms such as Google Workspace and Canvas.
AI services including Claude and OpenAI also reported problems linked to Microsoft connectors, with Anthropic saying some users could still see errors and OpenAI saying it was still investigating.
Microsoft executive Charles Lamanna said late Thursday there was no indication the outage was the result of malicious or cyber activity. On Friday, Microsoft reported improvements in service availability but said some users could still experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery.
By the end of Friday, most issues appeared to have been resolved, though the source reports that some services had not yet fully recovered earlier in the day.
