A major outage left Microsoft users unable to access multiple services Monday, disrupting the workday for many, including police departments unable to rely on the national 911 system, some city officials said.
At 7:20 PST, over five hours after the disruption began, Microsoft tweeted:
“The majority of services are now recovered for most users. We’re closely monitoring some residual impact for a subset customers located within North America. Please visit https://status.office.com for additional information.”
Users across the country started reporting problems just after 2 p.m. Monday afternoon, according to website Downdetector.com.
The outages appeared to affect the national 911 system, with several police departments instructing residents to use alternate numbers.
“As of 5 p.m., City phones and emails are experiencing intermittent outages related to a larger Microsoft 365 outage,” the City of Redmond, Washington tweeted. “We are hoping the issue is resolved shortly. Sorry for any inconvenience.”
Police departments in cities across the country took to social media to warn citizens.
Roughly 30 minutes after the initial tweets, several departments advised that problems with the 911 system appeared to have been resolved.
Roughly 45 minutes after the outage began, Microsoft said they were investigating “an issue affecting access to multiple Microsoft 365 services.”
After initial attempts to fix the problem failed, Microsoft advised users two hours later that they would start rerouting traffic to “alternate infrastructure.”
The affected products included Office 365, Outlook, Teams, Azure, Exchange Online, OneDrive and SharePoint.