A widespread outage involving Microsoft's Outlook and other applications has impacted corporations, governments, universities, courts and hospital systems, according to statements released by a host of entities in the United States and abroad.

Artificial intelligence giant Anthropic, the national health system in the United Kingdom and New York City's Emergency Management Department were among the institutions that issued notices about fallout from the outage.

Some alerts from affected institutions came on Thursday, while other notices were released on Friday morning. In some cases, entities said Microsoft access had been partially restored as of Friday.

On Friday morning, Microsoft said it is working to restore service and it is "seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements as recovery actions continue." The company apologized for the outage later on Friday.

The tech giant first posted a statement on social media saying it was "investigating reports of users experiencing issues" accessing online mailboxes shortly before 1 p.m. ET Thursday.

Anthropic said on Thursday some services involving its chatbot Claude had been affected by the outage, though the company added on Friday it had seen "signs of recovery."

Some city governments across the U.S. warned of service interruptions as a result of the Microsoft outage.

The city government of Austin, Texas, said on X on Thursday its employees "cannot receive or send emails at this time." Baltimore, Maryland, noted Friday in a message on its website city services are "operating normally, but a global Microsoft outage is delaying City email."

Amid the outage, New York City's Emergency Management Department warned residents of potential delays in reaching city agencies.

"If you are trying to contact a New York City agency by email or access an online City service that relies on Microsoft systems, you may experience delays or temporary disruptions," NYC Emergency Management said on social media. "These issues may affect the delivery of emails, responses from City agencies, and access to certain online services."

Health systems were also affected by the outage.

Unity Health Toronto, a Canadian hospital network said on Thursday it had experienced a disruption for some of its email services, though "patient and resident care is not affected by the outage."

The United Kingdom's National Health Service said on Friday on X its staff are "working to ensure critical services and appointments continue for patients, despite the global Microsoft issue having a disruptive impact."

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom said Friday on X it is "currently not receiving emails, but the Portal and contact forms are still functioning as normal."

Some universities also reported service disruptions.

Cambridge University, in England, on Friday said on X the Microsoft outage has "impacted email, calendars and SharePoint."

Across the Atlantic Ocean, New Jersey-based Kean University issued a notice Thursday on X warning of impact on "university email services."

Microsoft apologized for its Outlook service disruption Friday morning as email inboxes thawed and some users received a trickle of unread messages, as systems are being restored.

"This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents. The incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change. We have addressed the underlying issue and continue to restore service to remaining customers and regions," the company said.

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