Tens of thousands of users reported issues with Microsoft products in Canada and the U.S. Thursday afternoon, according to outage tracker Downdetector. There were nearly 150,000 reports of problems using Microsoft Outlook in both Canada and the U.S. at 1:30 p.m. ET, the website reported. As of 11:30 p.m., there were still more than 22,000 combined reports of issues between the two countries. Microsoft’s service incidents social media account said it was investigating. “We’ve determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors,” it wrote online. Issues were also reported with Copilot and Microsoft 365, the subscription suite that includes various apps like Word, Excel, Teams, OneDrive and others. Hospitals, Via Rail among those impacted Hospitals across Canada said the Microsoft outage affected their services. Unity Health Toronto declared a “Code Grey,” which is called when there is a loss or failure of infrastructure. The Catholic health-care network said in a statement its staff were experiencing difficulties sending and receiving emails. It advised anyone who needs to reach a clinic or department about an upcoming appointment to call the main hospital line if urgent. “Please be advised that patient and resident care is not affected by the outage. Our hospitals remain safe and open to provide care,” Unity Health said. In Quebec, the Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM) also said the outage impacted appointment requests and “certain international operations” across the network. “Please note that some of our operations and services may be temporarily delayed. Our teams are doing everything possible to minimize the impact of this situation on the care and services we provide,” reads a message on the CHUM website. Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital was also impacted. Meanwhile, Via Rail said passengers may not be able to receive email communications about their trip due to the outage. “We encourage passengers to use the Via Rail train tracker or to subscribe to SMS notifications through the Via Rail Train Status & Schedules Page to get the most updated information about their train,” it said. Several Toronto-area post-secondary institutions also say their email services are impacted, including the University of Toronto, Seneca Polytechnic, and George Brown Polytechnic. It doesn’t appear classes are affected by the outage. Other outages Downdetector.com also noted more than 500 reported issues in both Canada and the U.S. with Amazon Web Services and more than 1,000 with Gmail, as of 5:15 p.m. With files from CTV News Toronto’s Bryann Aguilar and CTV News Montreal’s Joe Lofaro.
