Thursday’s Microsoft 365 outage reached well beyond inboxes, cutting off email and internal communications for law enforcement, courts, hospitals, utilities, transit agencies, schools and at least one publicly traded company across North America and overseas.
The failure centered on Exchange Online, the Microsoft system that runs email and calendars for most businesses and public agencies using Microsoft 365, and spread to Teams, SharePoint and other workplace tools. Microsoft has not said how many customers lost service.
Los Angeles County Agencies Hit
Los Angeles County posted a notice on its website saying the outage was “currently blocking county departments from accessing email and key communications platforms.” The county directed residents to reach departments by phone through the directory at lacounty.gov. Its general information line is 213-974-1234.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the Los Angeles Police Department both confirmed problems with their Microsoft email, City News Service reported. A deputy at the Sheriff’s Information Bureau said department email had not updated since about 9:40 a.m.
The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office was also among agencies with affected email and communications, NBC Los Angeles reported.
County Supervisor Janice Hahn confirmed some county departments were affected but said work serving residents was continuing. She urged employees to pick up the phone or walk down the hall rather than rely on email.
The Superior Court of Los Angeles County said its email was affected, but all courthouses remained open and hearings proceeded as scheduled. The court said remote appearance technology and its call centers were working.
Culver City, Utilities and Transit
Culver City issued an advisory saying the outage was affecting its ability to provide certain services and that responses from City Hall staff could be delayed. The city said emergency services were not affected and asked residents to postpone nonessential in-person visits.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power confirmed its email was affected, but said no electric or water service was disrupted. A representative for Metro also confirmed the transit agency had been affected.
Not every agency went dark. The Los Angeles Mayor’s Office reported no disruptions, saying it uses Google’s productivity suite rather than Microsoft’s.
Government Agencies Nationwide
New York City Emergency Management warned residents that people trying to contact city agencies by email or use online city services that rely on Microsoft systems could experience delays. The city urged residents to call 311 for non-emergency services and 911 for emergencies.
In Michigan, the state’s Department of Technology, Management and Budget said the outage was affecting some government operations and that email responses could be delayed.
In New Mexico, the outage hit state and local government, hospitals, colleges and two utility companies, the Albuquerque Journal reported. Albuquerque’s municipal government also lost email. Some state departments kept working through Teams, while others lost access across the Microsoft suite.
“We in the state government are used to having to pivot, so that’s what we’re doing,” said Lauren Dodd Thorp, spokesperson for New Mexico’s Information Technology Department.
Hospitals and Health Systems
In Toronto, Unity Health Toronto, which includes St. Michael’s Hospital, declared a “Code Grey,” the alert hospitals use for a loss or failure of infrastructure. The network said staff were having trouble sending and receiving email but that patient and resident care was not affected.
In Michigan, Michigan Medicine acknowledged the outage was affecting access to its email and other Microsoft applications, and sources at Henry Ford Health told The Detroit News the health system lost access to email and Teams.
Schools and Universities
Universities in Illinois, Michigan and New Mexico reported disruptions. The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign confirmed outages to its email, Teams, SharePoint and Copilot services.
The effects reached rural Australia, where the outage struck during school hours Friday. The School of the Air in Longreach, Queensland, canceled online classes for students who learn remotely from sheep and cattle stations, ABC News Australia reported.
Business and Industry
Electric truck maker Workhorse Group postponed its third-quarter earnings release and conference call from Thursday to Monday, Nov. 16, at 4:30 p.m. Eastern time. The company said the delay was due to “business disruptions caused by the global Microsoft outages.” Workhorse did not say what specific operations were affected.
In Canada, VIA Rail was among organizations affected, BNN Bloomberg reported.
The disruption also spread to artificial intelligence services that connect to Microsoft 365. OpenAI said new connections through its Microsoft connectors might be broken, and Anthropic reported an issue with an upstream provider affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.
Microsoft also listed Defender for Office 365 among affected services, noting its Safe Links feature might be unable to verify web addresses. That feature checks links in email and Teams messages for malicious sites before users open them.
What Was Not Affected
Unlike the 2024 CrowdStrike software failure, which grounded flights and froze bank and hospital computer systems worldwide, Thursday’s outage was largely limited to workplace email and collaboration tools. No major airline, bank or payment system failures linked to the outage had been reported as of Thursday evening.
Amazon Web Services said its platform was operating normally, and reports of problems with Google and other services on outage-tracking sites were not confirmed.
Recovery Still Uneven
Around 3 p.m. PST, Microsoft said it was returning a portion of affected servers to service and that they remained stable. The company later said restored servers could become unresponsive again once they received traffic and that it was working on a fix.
By about 4 p.m. PST, Microsoft said it was seeing limited recovery and that users might see service come back gradually as their apps reconnect.
Those affected likely range into the millions.
Microsoft has not given an estimate for full recovery or announced a root cause.
