Microsoft 365 Outage - Guidance for Staff
Update (Nov 13): Microsoft reports improving service availability across affected regions, including North America. While recovery is progressing, intermittent disruptions may continue as Microsoft works toward full restoration.
Clinical Guidance and Patient Care:
If clinicians or patients are experiencing delays in receiving expected results or clinical information, clinicians should refer to Alberta Netcare or MPR, as appropriate, to verify available results rather than relying solely on email notifications.
For results routing, ePrescribe or other affected clinical workflows, staff should follow established workarounds and escalation processes. Urgent clinical matters should not be delayed while awaiting email delivery.
Current Status and Impacts:
- Connect Care: The core clinical system remains operational. However, impacts to results routing and ePrescribe have been identified, with workarounds in place.
- Epic Outbound Faxing: External eFax systems dependent on Microsoft 365 may experience delivery delays. A "Completed" status in Epic does not guarantee receipt by the intended recipient. For urgent or critical faxes, staff must contact the receiving organization to confirm receipt.
- Outlook/Exchange Online: Email services are recovering, although some users may continue to experience intermittent access issues and delivery delays as Microsoft clears remaining backlogs.
- HSS Application Notifications: Our outbound email queue is currently clear, with no delays identified in applications sending email notifications. However, delivery to external recipients may still be impacted by Microsoft 365 disruptions.
- Microsoft Teams: Core functionality, including chats, channels and meetings, remains operational. Calendar, meeting scheduling and Outlook-dependent features may still be impacted.
- Other Microsoft 365 Services: Intermittent issues may continue across SharePoint, Copilot, Power Apps, Planner and other Microsoft applications.
Staff Guidance:
- Continue using Microsoft Teams for communication where possible.
- Do not use personal email for work-related communications.
- For HSS-provided staff scheduling support, contact 1-844-425-5777.
- For EHS-AB staffing needs, contact on-duty leadership.
- Report operational or patient care impacts through established escalation channels.
Next Steps:
Microsoft continues to restore service capacity and clear outstanding email backlogs. HSS IT continues to monitor the situation, assess clinical and operational impacts, and support established workarounds. Further updates will be shared as required.
