The daylong Microsoft outage that began Thursday afternoon interrupted a key channel of communications for 400 million active accounts across the globe. The outage affected Outlook, the company’s email platform, as well as its Teams communications software and Copilot AI tool.

Among those affected were several Butler County entities that adapted to the disruption and resumed work.

County Commissioner Leslie Osche said email services were down for county staff and officials.

Staff adjusted by communicating through phone calls or texts for urgent matters or shifting focus on other projects “to keep things moving,” she said.

Cranberry Township’s Tina Fedko, director of communications, said the outage did not present any major challenges to township staff. She said they were able to work through the shutdown successfully.

At Slippery Rock University, the campus community was notified about the disruptions before 2 p.m. through a text alert and the university portal, according to Justin Zackal, SRU director of communications.

In addition to Outlook, email and calendars went down for the university, but other Microsoft 365 services, such as Teams and Copilot, also experienced disturbances Zackal said.

While the system failure presented some inconveniences, it did not hamper SRU’s operations beyond that, Zackal said.

“University operations continued with minimal disruption during the Microsoft outage,” Zackal said in an email. “SRU’s operations are not entirely dependent on a single system for workflow and communication.”

Microsoft reported progress in restoring services on Friday afternoon.

SRU’s IT department continues to monitor the situation, Zackal said.