A widespread Microsoft 365 outage is disrupting communications across the Grand Erie District School Board, with families being asked to phone schools rather than send emails.
The outage began Thursday affecting Outlook email and other Microsoft services, including Teams and SharePoint. Service problems continued into Friday morning, with recovery efforts still underway.
Grand Erie advised families Thursday that employees would be unable to send or receive emails during the disruption.
Anyone with questions should call their school or the Education Centre.
Microsoft said servers became unexpectedly unavailable, putting additional pressure on the remaining infrastructure.
The company reported progress toward improving stability and restoring capacity, but full recovery had not been confirmed in the early-morning update.
The disruption has affected users internationally, with Outlook among the hardest-hit services.
Nearly 130,000 reports were submitted to outage-tracking website Downdetector around Thursday’s peak.
Grand Erie says it will share further information as it becomes available. Microsoft is also providing updates through its service status page.