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St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
Hospitals and other health institutions in Toronto say their e-mail services are returning to normal after a global Microsoft 365 outage caused some delays and disruptions.
Unity Health Toronto, which includes St. Michael’s Hospital and St. Joseph’s Health Centre, says staff experienced difficulties sending and receiving e-mails on Thursday but people could reach a clinic or department by calling the main hospital phone line.
The health-care network says patient and resident care is not affected by the outage and its hospitals continue to operate.
University Health Network, which includes Toronto General Hospital, Princess Margaret Cancer Centre and others, also says the e-mail outage didn’t impact patient care.
Sunnybrook Hospital, the largest trauma centre, says it remains open for care as staff experience difficulties sending and receiving e-mails, but people can still reach clinics about upcoming appointments by calling the main hospital phone line.
Some Microsoft services back online as global outage disrupts businesses and governments
The outage was affecting a wide range of Microsoft services, including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot.
Microsoft said Outlook e-mail service was up and running again for many users in North America as of Friday morning, but warned that some users may still encounter “intermittent access issues or delayed e-mail delivery.”
The City of Toronto has said some services may be temporarily unavailable or delayed as a result of the Microsoft outage.
Meanwhile, Via Rail said its train operations continue normally across its network despite the Microsoft disruption.
“Considering that some passengers may have intermittent access to their emails, we encourage them to use the Via Rail train tracker or to subscribe to SMS notifications through the Via Rail train status and schedules page to get the most up-to-date information about their train,” it said.