It was a dark day for people who rely on Microsoft workplace software. A global outage that started midday Thursday stretched into Friday morning, disrupting social services and business communications. An inconvenience for many office workers and independent businesspeople. “I wasn’t getting any emails all day,” said Sarah Belliveau. “I couldn’t send emails and that was pretty much it.” Nojood Alakhrass said some of her work was postponed because she couldn’t contact clients. “I’m doing some paperwork, working in person with my clients, but I cannot communicate unless I’m using my WhatsApp or social media,” said Alakhrass. Joey Richard said some communication between office workers and clients were impacted. “You can see how one issue there can cause a big worldwide impact on the communication side, but other than that it’s up and running today,” said Richard. New Brunswick-based cyber security expert David Shipley said the magnitude of the outage was massive. “As far as I can tell, this is the most widespread and longest outage of Microsoft services used globally ever,” said Shipley. Shipley said over 70 countries were impacted with tens of millions of users. “And it wasn’t just email. It eventually effected the ability to do file sharing, some of their real time-time collaboration and chat tools, Teams, was impacted,” said Shipley. “Email and productivity suites mean a lot, and they matter in areas that matter a lot to us. Health care. We saw VIA Rail unable to alert passengers in changes in train schedules or other things happening because their infrastructure was down.” On Friday, the Francophone South School District closed two Bouctouche schools as a precautionary measure due to a potential threat. Because of the outage, the district used their social media platforms to notify parents. But many services were impacted minimally or not at all, including Moncton City Hall. “Our email systems were not working for about three hours on Thursday afternoon, but we have lots of other redundant systems, so people were able to use Teams and text and phone and - imagine this - talk to each other in person,” said City of Moncton spokesperson Aloma Jardine. “Everyone was able to navigate it pretty easily.” The cause of the Microsoft outage is under investigation, but Shipley said it’s not believed to be a cyber-attack. For more New Brunswick news, visit our dedicated provincial page.
