Global Microsoft outage disrupts locally

The Narragansett Police Department could not access Outlook Thursday, but it could access Facebook.

“Well, our work here is done. Outlook is down,” the department’s Facebook post read, punctuated at the end with a crying-laughing emoji.

The department was but one entity with a frozen inbox Thursday due to a global outage of Microsoft 365, the cloud-based software suite with millions of enterprise users worldwide across businesses, governments and colleges and universities. The outage affected a still-to-be-determined number of users worldwide, although the number of people affected reliably appears to be in the millions.

Grabbing many of the headlines was the inability for many users to access Outlook, 365’s email client and a longstanding flagship product for the Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft.

Lack of access to Outlook was one of the major headaches caused by the 365 outage for numerous Rhode Island state and municipal agencies Thursday, although most officials said they had recovered operations and it was business as usual Friday morning — including the Narragansett Police Department.

“Our department’s email service has been fully restored as of around 6 a.m. this morning,” Capt. Ryan Prest said over email Friday, noting that no other operations or communications beyond Outlook were affected Thursday.

At the state level, the Department of Labor and Training initially told Rhode Island Current Friday morning that the outage affected not only Outlook and 365 products but also phone queues for unemployment insurance and temporary disability insurance.

The department’s employees had “continued processing claims behind the scenes to prevent any delays in service,” spokesperson Edwine Paul said.

Paul revised the claim about phone difficulties, however, in a follow-up email Friday afternoon, saying the claimant hotline had operated normally throughout the outage.

At Rhode Island College, the outage stretched from Thursday afternoon and into the evening, according to spokesperson John Taraborelli. He noted that while the overall impact was minimal, the college did make one concrete change, and gave students an extra day to withdraw from courses, since the deadline had been Thursday.

The command center of Rhode Island state government’s IT infrastructure — the Department of Administration’s Enterprise Technology Strategy and Services division — acknowledged statewide disruptions had occurred Thursday.

“Despite the inconvenience, State operations continued, and services were restored by Microsoft before the start of business this morning,” DOA spokesperson Karen Greco said Friday via email.

Contemplating the cloud

IT workers at state and municipal agencies weren’t the only ones with Microsoft-related migraines Thursday. The phones at the Roger Williams University help desk began buzzing promptly at 1 p.m. yesterday with complaints about email not going through.

RWU’s Chief Information Officer Daryl Ford said in a phone interview Friday that university IT staff quickly realized the problem was on Microsoft’s end, and not the school’s.

“We’re basically completely dependent upon them for faculty and staff email,” Ford said. “So we couldn’t do much at all in terms of restoring Office 365 services.”

At RWU, Outlook was the only service down throughout the outage, Ford said, while other apps — like Teams, SharePoint and Copilot — were “radically up and down” over the course of the outage.

Ford noted that while students primarily use Google’s Gmail instead, they still receive university-wide messages via the Microsoft 365 architecture. So the university pivoted and used its emergency notification system to inform students about the situation via text message.

“It’s basically supposed to be for emergencies — active shooters and weather alerts and so forth — but we consider this an emergency as well whenever communications are down,” Ford said.

The school uses Brightspace for its learning platform, and Ford said he was not aware of any significant academic disruptions or extensions to student deadlines because of the outage.

Ford also saw a lesson in the whole ordeal. He said some pressure has been applied for him to “consolidate on one platform, either Google or Microsoft.”

“I’ve been reluctant,” Ford said, citing the Microsoft outage as one example that a “bifurcated” solution may be superior to putting all one’s eggs in a single basket.

“If one’s down, we still have access to another, we still have some semblance of an operation going on,” Ford said.

The University of Rhode Island experienced a similar situation Thursday, according to spokesperson Dawn Bergantino. She noted that the school uses Google Workspace for email, thereby insulating university email from the Microsoft havoc, although other apps like Teams and SharePoint were intermittently slow, she said.

The decision to invest in multiple cloud services runs parallel to another trend in enterprise-scale IT which involves businesses moving certain services and data back to infrastructure they control, also known as “on prem,” instead of relying exclusively on a public cloud housed in a far-off data center.

A 2026 survey by S&P Global’s 451 Research found that 47% of respondents had moved data from public cloud providers back to their own data centers or privately owned ones in the previous year, up from 40% in 2024. The trend is driven partially by concerns about cost, data privacy and dependence on outside providers.

But for large, complex institutions like a school, Ford suggested there are limits, especially when it comes to email, on what can be brought in-house.

“We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel,” he said.

Still, the incident underscored for him how invisible the reliance on these platforms has become.

“The world revolves around electronic communication,” Ford said. “It’s kind of like electricity. We don’t miss it until it goes out.”

Microsoft works to restore service

An incident feed from Microsoft updated Friday traced the outage to an issue introduced during an earlier network capacity upgrade.

The update log on Friday afternoon noted that the underlying problem had been resolved but that the company was still working to restore service, an effort which included clearing backlogged emails.

“We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure,” Charles Lamanna, a Microsoft executive vice president, said in a statement provided to Rhode Island Current Friday morning. “We know our customers rely on our services to get important work done every day, and regret the impact these outages had on those who depend on us.”

Microsoft plans to publish a full post-incident report. The current incident log is also available on Microsoft’s website. The University of Pennsylvania has a mirrored copy of the log across the incident’s duration.