Microsoft services that went down Thursday afternoon are starting to come back online and Pittsburgh city government was among the many people affected during the outage.
ABC's Peter Charalambous explained on the Big K Morning Show the company says the problem concerned Microsoft servers, "...suggesting that there was some kind of issue, taking the servers offline to protect them, uh even though there really wasn't an issue, and drastically decreasing the overall computing power that the company has."
Charalambous says while Microsoft isn’t sure what caused the outage, it doesn’t appear to be an attack.
"They haven't really clearly identified what caused this issue. They say there's no evidence of malicious activity like a cyber-attack. That being said, the messaging they've put out thus far is a little bit inconsistent and at times contradictory. At one point, they suggested this was caused by one of their systems that they use to check on server health. So imagine a thermostat in your car malfunctioning, uh suggesting that the engine incorrectly is overheating and prompting a check engine light or uh or even forcing a shutdown of the engine..."
Pittsburgh city employees are among those affected by the Microsoft outage, but the city says critical operations were not significantly impacted.
The city's Department of Innovation & Performance tells KDKA Radio the outage began around 1 p.m. Thursday with services largely restored by 8 Friday morning.
Employees may have experienced intermittent problems accessing Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft applications.
But the department says it's not aware of any significant impact to critical city operations.
The mayor's daily schedule, typically emailed to the media, was distributed by text message as the city worked around the disruption.
