Microsoft outage takes out lawmakers' email for 18 hours

Office 365 retail pack at Microsoft Store. (Raysonho @ Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)

(The Center Square) - A widespread outage involving Microsoft products online intruded in the work lives of state government employees Thursday into Friday, including a lack of email access by lawmakers for roughly 18 hours.

"We had no email," said Democratic state Rep. Joe Ciresi of Montgomery County, chairman of the House Communications & Technology Committee. "As far as I know, the whole state was down."

Approximately 45 state agencies were impacted by the outage that started Thursday, according to Dan Egan, a spokesman for the state Department of Administration. By Friday afternoon, he said, all state employees had regained access to Outlook, Microsoft's email system.

Ciresi said he had questions about the cause of the incident and why the company explanation disseminated by national media seemed vague. As chairman of a House committee with jurisdiction on the topic, Ciresi said he would consider calling a hearing with intent of having Microsoft "tell us what the deal was."

Republican Rep. Russ Diamond of Lebanon County agreed that writing the situation off as a major tech glitch was not acceptable.

"It's a huge concern. This is the way we communicate with each other in government," Diamond said. Because he relies on a Microsoft calendar product, Diamond said, "I actually had to call my district office after hours to find out what I was doing tomorrow."

The questions raised by the incident, Diamond said, include, "How vulnerable are we? Should we have redundant systems? Should we have systems that are localized and not centralized?"

Loss of email puts government in a "precarious position," Diamond said. "Imagine what would happen if we had a weeklong outage."

A series of posts on Thursday on the "Microsoft 365 Status" account on the social media platform X gave updates. One said, "We've confirmed the issue may affect Microsoft 365 connectivity for users in any region."

Another, posted Friday morning, said, "We're seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure."

Some autonomous state agencies reported little disruption.

Steve Chizmar, a spokesman for state Treasurer Stacy Garrity, said the office lost email but continued to be able to access the online meeting program Microsoft Teams. State finances were not impacted, Chizmar said.

The office of state Auditor General Tim DeFoor similarly did not experience a great impact, according to spokeswoman April Hutcheson.

Email at the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania went down on Thursday into early Friday morning, according to Executive Director Kyle Kopko. Employees of the association also lost access to calendar functions.

As a result of the incident, CCAP's technology staff intend to "game out" ways to respond to similar happenings in the future. Kopko said it was possible the organization would install a secondary communications system as a backup.