DETROIT, Mich. — A worldwide failure of Microsoft 365 knocked out email and other workplace tools across Michigan on Thursday, slowing communication at state agencies, Detroit city hall, major hospitals and the region’s airport authority.
The Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget warned that state government was having trouble with email and other Microsoft programs and that replies to the public could be delayed until service was restored. The City of Detroit’s Department of Innovation and Technology issued a similar notice for residents and partners.
Health systems were hit as well. Michigan Medicine said Outlook and other Microsoft applications were affected, and Henry Ford Health lost access to Outlook and Teams. University of Michigan Health staff also could not use the programs, though patient care was generally unaffected; some business and administrative tasks could lag.
The Wayne County Airport Authority confirmed it was affected and referred questions about flights to the airlines. Delta, which runs more flights than any other airline at Detroit Metro, said some employees could not send or receive email but travelers were not affected.
Nationally, the outage-tracking site Downdetector logged more than 97,000 Outlook problem reports at 2:07 p.m. Thursday, along with more than 38,000 for Microsoft 365 and about 4,500 for Teams. The disruption also broke connectors that AI tools rely on to reach Microsoft accounts.
Microsoft said it paused all deployments, shifted traffic away from the affected systems and restarted servers. The company has pointed to a configuration update that overloaded servers and took them offline; when engineers tried a fix, some servers failed again as traffic returned. By Friday morning, Teams was back and most remaining trouble centered on Exchange, the email system behind Outlook, with Microsoft reporting early signs of stabilization but capacity still below normal.
From the HERE City State Desk.
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