A Microsoft outage hit around the world, including right here at home. Municipalities across our region couldn’t send or receive email for much of the day on Thursday, including Barrie, Springwater and Clearview. Staff at cities and towns in the majority of Simcoe County and Muskoka were working to catch up Friday, as Microsoft 365, Teams and Outlook came back online. However, many are still reporting intermittent issues as the backlog of emails works its way through the system. The Simcoe County District School Board and Georgian College also use Microsoft products. Some services weren’t affected, such as the Barrie Police Service, Lakehead University and Simcoe Muskoka Catholic District School Board, of which none use Outlook, so they didn’t have any problems. While Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre (RVH) in Barrie did see its email go down affecting routine administrative tasks, patient care was not impacted. RVH President Gail Hunt tells CTV News hospitals are regularly exercising “emergency planning methods.” “We do have alternate communication things for our leadership teams to be able to keep contact, even outside of emails or Teams,” Hunt says. “We do have dedicated, secure systems to be able to continue to communicate through urgent situations so that we can always maintain a level of operations.” Microsoft says it’s “deeply sorry” for the outage and resulting problems it caused.
