Canada still feeling the impact of massive Microsoft outage
Canadians are now on day two of the widespread Microsoft outage, though services appear to be slowly improving.
The ongoing disruption has impacted hospitals, universities, government organizations, and businesses across Canada, affecting access to several Microsoft products, including Teams, Outlook, and Copilot.
The outage began Thursday afternoon, with tens of thousands of North American users reporting issues, according to outage tracker Downdetector.
Schools such as Nova Scotia Community College and hospital networks including Unity Health Toronto reported service disruptions in the country. According to CTV News, St. Michael’s Hospital declared a Code Grey, which is when a hospital experiences a systems failure that disrupts essential services and operations.
Via Rail was also impacted, telling passengers on X that they may not receive communications about their trips due to the outage.
The outage has also affected organizations internationally. Singapore’s Government Technology Agency, for example, reported disruptions to government email services, while Air India said its flight operations remained unaffected.
In an update Thursday evening, Microsoft said services were beginning to return for some users, although many continued to experience issues.
By Friday morning, the company reported further improvements.
“We’ve implemented additional mitigation measures and are restoring the remaining affected infrastructure while investigating residual service issues. We’re closely monitoring service health and validating recovery across affected connection methods to ensure sustained service stability,” read the update.
As for the cause of the outage, Microsoft has attributed the disruption to server-related problems.
“At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident,” the company said in its latest status update.
Downdetector recorded just over 2,000 reports of Microsoft service disruptions in Canada and approximately 10,000 in the U.S. as of 8:30 a.m. ET on Friday.
Microsoft says it will provide another update in the coming hours.