Nelson lawyers had to finalise property settlements by phone and through personal Gmail accounts today, after a global Microsoft outage left tens of thousands of people unable to get into their Outlook email accounts.
The problems started before 7am when the Microsoft 365 began failing. It is the cloud subscription service behind Outlook and Teams and businesses across Nelson Tasman rely on it.
RMF partner Craig Morice says the firm had a couple of settlements due today but was not getting the emails from banks confirming funds had cleared.
Staff had to deal with out-of-town lawyers through private Gmail accounts, but only after the lawyers on the other side agreed to it. Much of the rest was done over the phone.
“We used to do it with fax, now no one has fax,” says Craig.
Before fax machines, lawyers walked settlements around town with a typed undertaking and a bank cheque, he says. “Everything is done by email now.”
He says productivity was “right down”.
Summit Real Estate operations manager David Turnhout says work for his team has looked a little different today.
“It’s had a big effect within our company and with our clients. We can do some manual paper-based work, but most is based online.”
Any contact has been by phone call or text message – or back to “face-to-face discussions”.
“It definitely makes you realise how reliant we are on it, especially Outlook.”
At NBS, Robyn Sheves says the outage had slowed staff down because the systems were “so integral to the way we operate”. NBS put a notice on its website telling clients that online banking was still working, and that they could also call or come into a branch.
“It’s been an odd day,” she says.
Nelson City Council’s head of customer experience, Matt Lorraine, says the outage has made things trickier, but they are “keeping things moving”.
“The first challenge was how do we communicate with 300-plus people internally without the ability to email?” he says.
“The day started with IT walking each floor to spread the word as people arrived. Microsoft Teams is still running, so staff can keep in touch that way and of course, by face-to-face chats.”
Talking with people outside the council has been harder, Matt says.
“A contractor closing a road on Monday couldn’t be emailed his approval, so we sent him screenshots instead. Even this response to Top South Now was sent via text.”
Matt says the council’s customer service team has had a busy day on the phones, as people know they can’t email.
Their service request system also usually emails staff when a job is assigned to them, but with email down, staff are checking it by hand so nothing slips through.
“We’ve tried to keep today as business as usual as possible and have kept responding where we can, but we expect there may be a backlog next week. We’ll work to respond to customer service requests as quickly as we can.”
Health NZ said there had been “minimal disruption” to its services and it was continuing to monitor and manage the situation.
At first Microsoft said it was looking into outage reports “in the Americas”. It later confirmed the issue could affect users in any region. It said Teams, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Copilot and Defender XDR might also be affected.
Microsoft said part of its infrastructure was under “elevated load across multiple regions”, which was likely causing the connection errors. The company said it was “aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact”.
It has paused all deployments, is moving traffic off the affected infrastructure, and is restarting servers to bring them back into service.
