Local businesses adapt after massive Microsoft outage halts emails and meetings

Things are starting to get back to normal for workers after a Microsoft outage disrupted several services Thursday into Friday morning. 22 News reporter Sarah Bien-Aimé spoke with a local financial professional and a cybersecurity expert about the impact. So many people depend on this technology, so now they're waiting to hear what actually happened. For many employees, checking emails is one of the first things they do when starting their workday. But a Microsoft outage on Thursday left some workers unable to access their Outlook accounts and many other Microsoft services. Around 12.30, we just stopped getting email. We stopped being able to use Teams. It affected us because we had client calls with Zoom. According to Microsoft, some users also couldn't access recent files, share documents in SharePoint, or use Copilot. Most of the teams stayed up and running, but calendar features and meeting invites were affected. Now, this unexpected Microsoft outage left some employees finding alternative ways to get their job done. We started picking up the phone and calling people directly and not using Teams or email or video. And thank God we work at a big company, so we have home office that can switch, you know, system A to system B pretty quickly. By Friday morning, things were back to normal, locally. But people abroad were still running into connection issues and delayed emails. People were blowing up my phone as far away as Australia, basically because Microsoft was out all over the place. We are going to see more cloud outages like this. Microsoft says the outage started in its Exchange Online email system, which created a domino effect for other tools that rely on it. All of this traffic that was coming in and all this additional email has kind of like log jammed the system. So even though they're saying that the problem has been resolved, There still needs to be this clearing of that email. Now, as Microsoft tracks the recovery and prepares a report on what happened, experts say this outage shows why backup communication plans matter as well. Working for you, Sarah Ben-Amey, 22 News.