Why the State Treasurer’s Office Is Going Dark Today
ANNAPOLIS — If you are waiting on an email response, banking inquiry, or vendor payment update from 80 Calvert Street this morning, do not hold your breath. While the vast majority of Maryland state government runs on Google Workspace and is operating normally, the Maryland State Treasurer’s Office is an outlier that runs on Microsoft 365—and it is caught in the middle of a massive, global Microsoft outage.
The disruption, which began early Thursday afternoon and carried into Friday morning, has crippled Outlook, Exchange Online, and internal Microsoft messaging services across North America. Microsoft engineers confirmed the issue stemmed from a cascading infrastructure failure rather than a cyberattack, and while patches are underway, the company has extended email queuing timeouts to 48 hours and offered no firm timeline for full restoration.
For lobbyists, procurement attorneys, and state contractors, that technical divide in Annapolis matters today:
Most Executive Agencies: Operating on Google Workspace without interruption.
State Treasurer’s Office: Staff handling banking operations, insurance claims, Maryland 529, and vendor payment reconciliations are dealing with severe email and internal system bottlenecks.
If you have urgent business with Treasurer Dereck Davis’s shop today, skip the email and pick up the phone. Be kind and don’t yell, it is not the Treasurers fault.
