How the Microsoft outage impacted Western New York

Tonawanda, N.Y. (WBEN/AP) - Microsoft says progress is being made in bringing its popular workplace software back online as a global outage enters its second day, disrupting business communications, police crime reporting, court operations, AI tools and many other services.

The outage, which affected a wide range of Microsoft 365 services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot, left people, institutions and businesses across the world without access to email and other platforms.

Microsoft said it was making headway as it tried to restore services Friday.

“We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure,” the company said, as some users started reporting that their emails were restored.

Users may have “intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as mitigation progresses across the remaining affected infrastructure,” Microsoft said.

The total number of people affected is not clear, but the company said in January that it had more than 450 million paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions.

One of the local municipalities impacted by the Microsoft outage Thursday and Friday was the Town of Tonawanda. Town Supervisor John Flynn says the problems the town faced Thursday began lifting Friday morning, and their operations with Microsoft were starting to return to normal.

"The main impact that we had, and that all municipalities had across the country was our internal email system, along with our Teams capability to do any kind of meetings at all with our town officials. It was mainly an internal thing, but it had a slight spillover to the residents," said Flynn in an interview with WBEN.

"If any resident out there wanted to email any town official or town department about, let's say, a death certificate in a Clerk's Office or a building department issue for an inspection or an electrical permit, something like that, obviously the residents were impacted by that by not being able to communicate with our town departments. So while it mainly was an internal problem, it did obviously have spillover effects on the community."

While Flynn didn't know what problems other neighboring municipalities were dealing with, but he stressed the importance of having his own IT department in Tonawanda to help when issues like this may pop up.

"A lot of municipalities don't have their own internal IT department, they outsource that. I personally believe that having your own internal IT department is critical not only for cybersecurity, but for instances like this right here, where we can kind of get a rapid response team up-and-running," Flynn said. "When this affected us yesterday afternoon, I was immediately in contact with my IT folks, and we were trying to work on solving a problem. There's not much we could really do, though, because it was more of a Microsoft thing, and they had to fix it, unfortunately. So, like most municipalities here, we were waiting on them. The ball was in their court, and there's really not much that we could have done."

Flynn also feels it's important to have his on IT department, especially given the constant threat of cyberattack in today's age of technology.

"I think it's worth the taxpayer dollars to have full-time employees in the Town of Tonawanda who are working in the IT space. I've got about five employees in our department, and they're paid well, with benefits and all that. It's a cost to taxpayers, there's no doubt about it, and I probably could've outsourced it cheaper. ... But I think it's worth it to the taxpayers that we, in Tonawanda, have our own team because cybersecurity threats are out there," Flynn explained.

"We have our own water plant in Tonawanda, we have our own sewer treatment plant in Tonawanda. God forbid a foreign entity was able to hack into our water resources in Tonawanda, that could affect not only the residents of Tonawanda, but neighboring communities as well that use our water. That's some scary stuff. Obviously in my time as [District Attorney], I'm familiar with the threats out there, and there are bad guys out there in this world. We've got to prepare for the bad guys."

Local cybersecurity expert Arun Vishwanath says the issue at hand for Microsoft with its outage is an infrastructure problem, and nothing related to any kind of cyberattack or AI demand.

"It's a network update, infrastructure update that basically caused this," Vishwanath said with WBEN. "From what we understand, this has impacted multiple Microsoft 365 services, especially at the enterprise level and business level, and the restoration is happening. Last I heard, around 10-to-20% of the people are still facing some kind of disruptions, but it's coming back online."

This recent outage tells Vishwanath how vast the Microsoft product reach is, and how much in this day and age people depend on technology for everyday business.

"Think about it this way: Not so long ago, we were teaching people how to use technology. Remember we used to have these books called 'Microsoft for Dummies' and stuff; today we are so into technology that none of us can operate without it," Vishwanath said. "We no longer even have manuals that come with software. It's an expectation that we're using it in, essentially, every phase of every business out there. So be it a municipality, be it a school, be it a university, we are using this as part of the infrastructure of communication today. And not having it means many of these businesses cannot function."

The big lesson that Vishwanath says can be taken from this Microsoft outage, especially for business owners and municipalities, is be sure to have an alternative plan to accommodate for when important technology or systems may go down.

"Every business out there should have an alternative, a plan for what to do when things don't work. It's hard to do it, but you still need that plan and being prepared for it," he said. "Often we think about cybersecurity as a hack or a breach, but cybersecurity is also resilience. It's making sure systems that we depend on actually work, and having a plan in the back end when things don't work.

"Think of resilience like a rubber band: You've got to be able to bend and not break. And so, if you're reliant on systems for, essentially, everything, having a backup plan and preparing for that is very important. And that's the takeaway from this one."