Microsoft’s email platform, Outlook, experienced multiple outages on Monday, impacting nearly 18,000 users at one point today, including New York City offices.  

City Council members took to social media to redirect people on how to reach district offices while the systems were down, with some taking the chance to raise awareness on digital equity issues. 

Councilmember Amanda Farias says her offices had a backup plan in place that routed their emails and calls to a backup email account. Farias says that this outage shows the city’s need to look at how they can modernize their systems.  

“The fact that an entire city and its local government were dependent on one system like Outlook just shows me that stream lining our services, modernizing our services and our options and how we function as a locality is really important,” said Farias.  

Microsoft 365 tweeted throughout the day, updating users on the ongoing issues.