Some NYC residents left scrambling due to Microsoft outage impacting local businesses

NEW YORK – New York City businesses are feeling some impacts from the outage impacting Microsoft computers. 

Many banks, restaurants and cafes had to make adjustments due to the situation. 

Customers speak out about outage disruptions

At the TD Bank at the corner of 57th Street and Third Avenue, signs were taped in the window warning their systems were temporarily down. Customers could only use the ATM, which impacted how they bank. 

“I am always concerned about leaving something behind on some machine that someone else can get access to,” Upper East Side resident Paul Rudder said. 

TD Bank said it is “working hard to restore all online banking and other impacted systems.” 

New Yorkers said TD Banks weren’t the only ones dealing with issues. So was Chase. 

“I went to three different chases to make deposits, finally one of them, I was able to,” Sholeh Assadi said. 

Debbie More of Canarsie, Brooklyn said she can’t pay a bill in time due to the global disruption. 

“I mean, everything was down,” More said. “I couldn’t go online. I couldn’t go into my bank. That was bad. I had a bill due.”

Some self-checkout in kiosks in stores and pharmacies weren’t working due to the technical issues. Screens in Starbucks were also down, as was the option to order ahead using their app, causing long lines inside their cafes in New York City. 

“Just looks like its moving too slow,” Rockland County resident George Colby said. “This reminds me of Y2K. That was supposed to happen back then.”

Customers who tried to order ahead from Chipotle were also reporting issues. 

LabCorp, one of the largest clinical laboratory networks in the world, posted on social media that its systems were down, impacting certain business operations. 

Wakeup call for businesses 

Some experts said no business is immune to this type of incident. 

“If you’re a small business owner, everyone is conducting business online and you need to have a contingency plan,” Better Qualified president Paul Oster said. 

Oster said even though many small companies and stores weren’t impacted by this outage, it should still serve as a reminder to have business interruption insurance. 

“This is a huge wakeup call for businesses to reevaluate their IT plans. When was the last time you ran drill saying ‘What if my entire staff couldn’t get online today?'” Oster said. 

New York City said it ran those drills, and they paid off

While some New Yorkers were scrambling to make alternative arrangements in the wake of the outage, New York City leaders praised recent drills they’ve been running and steps they’ve been taking that kept critical city systems online during the outage. 

“It was good to see how quickly the team coordinated,” Mayor Eric Adams said. “You see the results of that – from not only from the notifications… but also the coming together of the team. The blueprint was already in place, all we had to do was execute on it.” 

“This is one of the reasons why we have New York City Cyber Command, and we have a citywide operations center, so we can detect these things as quickly as possible, and dispel what’s a threat versus what’s not a threat,” New York City’s Chief Technology Officer Matt Fraser said. “So as we started to see the symptoms manifest, we contacted our partners both at Microsoft and at CrowdStrike, and subsequently we got down to the root of the issue.”