VANCOUVER: Tens of thousands of users across Canada and the United States experienced widespread disruptions to Microsoft services on Thursday afternoon, according to outage tracker Downdetector. By 1:30 p.m. ET, nearly 150,000 reports of issues with Microsoft Outlook had been logged across both countries, with more than 22,000 combined reports persisting as late as 11:30 p.m. The outage also impacted Copilot and the Microsoft 365 subscription suite, including Word, Excel, Teams, and OneDrive.
Microsoft’s service incidents account confirmed that engineers were investigating the issue, attributing the connectivity errors to elevated loads across a portion of its infrastructure in multiple regions. The disruption had immediate ripple effects on critical Canadian infrastructure, prompting Unity Health Toronto to declare a “Code Grey” for infrastructure failure. While the Catholic health-care network reported that staff faced difficulties sending and receiving emails, officials assured the public that patient care remained unaffected and advised callers to use the main hospital phone line for urgent clinic inquiries.
Healthcare facilities in Quebec faced similar challenges, with the Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM) reporting temporary delays in appointment requests and certain international operations, alongside disruptions at Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital. Meanwhile, Via Rail warned passengers that email notifications regarding train schedules were impacted, urging travellers to rely on its online train tracker or SMS alerts instead. Several Toronto-area post-secondary institutions—including the University of Toronto, Seneca Polytechnic, and George Brown Polytechnic—also experienced email outages, though classes continued without interruption. Separately, Downdetector logged over 500 issue reports for Amazon Web Services and more than 1,000 for Gmail across North America by 5:15 p.m.
