Microsoft worldwide outage affects City of Hamilton, McMaster University

The Microsoft Corporation says it is still trying to resolve outage issues affecting many of its services that were affected on Thursday afternoon, and it’s having both global and local impacts.

The outage has impacted Microsoft Outlook, Teams and the tech giant’s AI assistant called Copilot, among other services, leaving people, institutions, businesses and students without access for hours.

Last night the City of Hamilton addressed the issue on ‘X,’ saying that the Microsoft 365 outage is affecting the City’s email services and may impact online services, including their website.

A global Microsoft 365 outage is affecting City of Hamilton email services and may impact access to online services, including https://t.co/j2ke0qeI82. Email responses may be delayed.

You can still reach the City by calling 905-546-2489.

— City of Hamilton (@cityofhamilton) November 13, 2026

Learning institutions around the world have also felt the impact.

At 4:30 p.m. Thursday, McMaster University confirmed that some of its services such as online forums, service requests, automated approvals and reporting tools could be affected.

In a statement, the City of Hamilton said email and other online services that were affected by the outage are largely back.

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Emergency operations provided by paramedics, firefighters, as well as 911 services have not been impacted, and city staff are able to send and receive emails, but there may be continued delays.

Hamilton Health Sciences also says email services are returning, St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton said their email system was briefly interrupted, but full service had resumed Friday, and Niagara Health said its business operations were impacted.

All three said there has been no impact on patient services and care.

The effects were seen at many institutions including police.

“Our internal and external emails via Microsoft were down,” said Halton Regional Police Const. Jeff Dillon. “That began yesterday afternoon, as it did with a lot of different companies around the world, it sounds like, and that ended this morning around 7 – 8 a.m., so we’re fully functional. It didn’t have a huge impact on our operations.”

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Hamilton police also says systems were restored Friday morning, and Niagara police said staff used other internal systems to stay in touch and coordinate their work, which kept the overall impact on operations minimal.

The City of Hamilton adds that residents may continue to experience delays including my.hamilton.ca, Hamilton utilities billing and permitting, planning, licensing and bylaw solutions that continue to rely on Microsoft email services.

In a web post on Friday morning, the university said that its Microsoft 365 services are gradually being restored.

In updates overnight, Microsoft said it continues to encounter issues with servers that are preventing them from working properly.

The company says it does not have any indication that the outage was caused by malicious activity and is treating the incident “with urgency and priority until full resolution.”

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