Police departments across the United States reported outages of their emergency 911 dispatch services Monday night.
Agencies from Arizona to Florida reported outages that typically lasted about 30 minutes before being restored.
The 911 problems occurred the same night that widespread outages were reported for Microsoft services.
Redmond, Washington — home of Microsoft’s headquarters — tweeted Monday that city phones and emails were also experiencing outages.
The service health status page for Microsoft Azure — the company’s cloud computing service — posted, “A subset of customers in the Azure Public and Azure Government clouds may encounter errors performing authentication operations for a number of Microsoft or Azure services.” Microsoft said customers “should see signs of recovery.”
A spokesperson for the sheriff’s office in Hennepin County, Minnesota, told CNN they were not sure whether their 911 outage was related to the Microsoft issue.
The New York Police Department told CNN that while their 911 services had no reported outages, they did experience issues with Microsoft accounts.
According to an internal memo shared by a senior NYPD official, department employees were not able to log into Microsoft email accounts from department desktops, but could still access email accounts through iPhones and iPads.
According the memo, which was sent out to all members of the department around 8:15 p.m., “the problem is due to a worldwide Microsoft issue,” and that “Microsoft engineers are currently investigating.”
It is unclear if the 911 problems and outages were related and the source of the 911 outages has not yet been identified.
