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Microsoft Outage Knocks Maryland Schools, Hospitals and 911 Systems Offline
A worldwide Microsoft cloud failure disrupted Baltimore County schools, hospital communications and law enforcement systems Thursday, with recovery stretching into Friday. Experts say the incident exposes how dependent critical local services have become on a handful of tech vendors.
OWINGS MILLS, Md. â A worldwide Microsoft outage disrupted operations across Maryland on Thursday, knocking out email and communications systems used by Baltimore County schools, hospitals and law enforcement, with recovery efforts continuing into Friday afternoon.
The failure affected more than 400 million users globally, according to the company. Microsoft said the root cause was a technical problem that surfaced during an earlier network capacity upgrade, and that the outage was not the result of a cyberattack.
Nearly 140,000 Outlook problems were reported worldwide, with about 130,000 of those in the United States, said Alex Spigel, CEO of Choice Cyber Solutions, a Maryland-based cybersecurity firm.
"We know that Exchange Online, Microsoft's cloud email service, was the core failure, but other services also broke because they're dependent on that," Spigel said.
The outage hit public services directly. Spigel said a friend who works in the Baltimore County school system was unable to do her job at all on Thursday.
"Not being able to work an entire day could cost a company a lot of money and a lot of efficiency," Spigel said.
Microsoft typically relies on servers around the world to stabilize its systems when problems arise, but this time the backup capacity failed too, Spigel said.
"They are basically just saying that the servers failed health checks and dropped offline, and a process that sets up secure connections on the remaining servers became overwhelmed," he said.
By Friday afternoon, Microsoft reported broad recovery and said it was gradually restoring service to remaining customers to keep the system stable. The company said it would review the incident and release a report detailing what happened.
Spigel urged businesses and public agencies to prepare for such disruptions rather than assume their vendors will handle everything.
"Backups are always a great idea. Don't always just depend on the vendor to keep you informed," he said.
The disruption highlights a growing vulnerability for Maryland communities: schools, hospitals and emergency responders increasingly run on a small number of cloud providers, meaning a single corporate failure can ripple through daily life. Local officials have not yet said how many students, patients or 911 calls were affected, or whether any services remain degraded.