A global Microsoft outage that began Nov. 12 disrupted email, voicemail, pagers and other communications at U.S. health systems.
Downdetector logged problems in more than 70 countries, and some health systems were still recovering Nov. 13. Here are nine updates:
1. Sunil Dadlani, executive vice president and chief information and digital officer of Morristown, N.J.-based Atlantic Health, told Becker’s the disruption reached well beyond email. “It impacts patient care, supply chain, and several other services,” Mr. Dadlani said.
2. Wilmington, Del.-based ChristianaCare said Nov. 12 the outage affected email as well as faxes and pagers that rely on email addresses. It asked patients with urgent needs to call practices directly.
3. Iowa City-based University of Iowa Health Care said Nov. 12 that email and voicemail were down across all its campuses and directed patients to MyChart messaging.
4. Luis Taveras, PhD, executive vice president and chief digital and information officer of Philadelphia-based Jefferson Health, confirmed to Becker’s that the organization’s email was affected.
5. Ann Arbor-based Michigan Medicine said in a Nov. 12 Facebook post that the outage was affecting access to Outlook and other Microsoft applications and that it was monitoring the situation. Lansing, Mich.-based University of Michigan Health-Sparrow shared the post.
6. Sources at Detroit-based Henry Ford Health said the system lost access to Outlook and Teams, according to The Detroit News.
7. Galveston, Texas-based UTMB Health said Nov. 13 that affected services, including email, Copilot, SharePoint and Power Apps, were starting to return to normal, though users could still see intermittent problems.
8. In a Nov. 13 update on X, Microsoft said email backlogs had dropped sharply and were nearing normal levels, though some users could still see intermittent access problems or delayed email. Its service health page still listed Microsoft 365 as degraded. Microsoft has said servers unexpectedly going offline strained its remaining infrastructure.
9. Microsoft executive Charles Lamanna said the outage was not caused by a cybersecurity incident.
More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, according to the company.
