Microsoft outage leaves Lakes Region town halls without email for hours

The Microsoft outage on Thursday affected email communication across the globe, but fortunately for Lakes Region communities, no major issues were reported, other than email.

“We are very technology-dependent, and luckily we didn’t lose the ability to register cars or have effects on the dispatch service for our police department,” Laconia City Manager Kirk Beattie said. “It was just email.”

Beattie said Microsoft’s email functions stopped working all together “right after lunch,” around 1 p.m. on Nov. 12. It was out the rest of the workday, and he didn’t start receiving emails again until Friday morning around 6:30 a.m.. By the time City Hall was open for the day, everything was back to normal.

Phones were not affected. Beattie said it did present some problems with communication with the public, as well as internally.

“We couldn’t send or receive anything,” Beattie said.

Mayor Mike Bordes, who is also a state representative, said the crash affected both his city and state email addresses.

“Any email I use with Outlook,” Bordes said.

Bordes noticed around “midday” on Thursday that he would receive notifications for emails, which wouldn’t be there when he tried to view them. He posted to Facebook addressing the issue.

“I just don’t want people to think I am ignoring them,” Bordes said.

Bordes said at about 9:45 a.m. on Friday that email had started to come back, but it was “glitchy.”

“Let’s face it,” Bordes said. “We all depend way too much on the internet these days, and a lot of businesses can’t function at all without it.”

Gilford Town Clerk Danielle Lafond said the town was without email until Friday morning, with Microsoft Outlook starting to malfunction around 1:30 p.m. on Thursday.

“It's weird, because I saw email was working, and then it just went down,” Lafond said.

While it didn’t present any issues with registrations or day-to-day functions in the town clerk’s office, the brief disruption in service was noticeable.

“I went to scan something in an email, and it just shows you, it’s crazy how dependent we all are on it,” Lafond said.

No public safety issues were reported in Gilford either, with Deputy Chief Brad Ober saying despite email being down on Thursday, there was “no problem.”

Gilford Police Capt. Adam VanSteensburg said he’d classify the crash as more of an “inconvenience,” and said everything was fine by Friday morning. The department lost email and some other Microsoft functions, but it didn’t affect dispatch or the ability to respond to calls.

“The system we use for all that is a completely separate software,” VanSteensburg wrote in a text message on Friday. “The only effect the PD saw was certain administrative tasks being delayed that wouldn’t have jeopardized public safety.”

Town Administrator Kris Kelley said this also went for Town Hall. Email went out on Thursday afternoon, but was fine early Friday. He said he was at his office early, and it was already back up and running before the start of the workday.

There weren’t major issues in Meredith either, with Finance Director Robert Carpenter saying Microsoft Outlook was down, but they were still able to use Microsoft Teams. He said the biggest issue was communication back and forth, but “everything else was fine.”

In neighboring Belmont, Finance Director Steve Forster was happy to report it didn’t affect town functions much.

“We were really only down for three hours yesterday, and as far as town clerk operations with motor vehicles, it didn’t have any affect,” Forster said.

Forster said it was “really the day-to-day use of email” that affected most people. By Friday morning, everything was business as usual.

Forster said there were no issues in his own department to note. Town Administrator Alicia Jipson was out on vacation, so Forster checked with the town’s departments to see if they were experiencing any major issues otherwise.

“I did a quick call around, and it doesn’t seem like anything catastrophic,” Forster said.

Forster had similar sentiments to Bordes, saying even while it wasn’t serious, it caused widespread concern and discussion well beyond town functions.

“Probably hundreds of millions of people use it,” Forster said.

Bordes recalled when he lived in New York City, and there was a blackout throughout the Northeast, between Aug. 14 and 15, 2003. The U.S. Department of Energy called it the “worst power blackout in history,” with about 50 million customers impacted.

He said even years ago, it created a massive disruption. Email is a bit of a different story, but he related the two, and the reaction from those affected. He said it just shows how dependent society is on technology.

“It was almost like Armageddon,” Bordes said. “Everyone was up in arms.”

Microsoft issued a public apology for the disruption on social media on Friday morning, confirming it was a “technical issue not related to cyber or AI/agents."

“We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners,” Microsoft posted on its X account. “We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously. We are seeing broad recovery and stability across our services.”

Microsoft stated the incident happened due to an issue during a network capacity upgrade, and it was addressed.

“Given the scale of demand, we restored services gradually, validating stability at each stage,” Microsoft stated. “While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration. We will provide a full post-incident report once our review is complete.”