IT outage impacting Social Security offices, businesses, court buildings

Customers at local Social Security offices were turned away at the door today by a sign that simply said ‘global outage.’

Monique and Antonio Cummings were sitting outside the office in Northwest Baltimore trying to figure out what was going on when we told them the worldwide Microsoft outage had closed all local social security offices. Most online services were unavailable too. That’s why they showed up in-person, because the website was down.

"We kinda planned it out to come today. It was hot all week so we tried to make it a cool day and we were off. So now we probably have to wait another month until we can find time to come out here again."

This was already Sharte Gray’s second attempt to get a new social security card this morning. Her first stop was at the office on Park Avenue, which was also closed.

"So then I'm thinking, maybe there's something going on just with this one so let me just go to another location. So I came here, and it's the same. And there's big old sign right here," Gray said.

Court buildings statewide were also impacted. They were closed to the public all day, except for emergency matters.

Hospitals saw disruptions too . LifeBridge Health, which operates several hospitals in the Baltimore area, activated a “systemwide command center” to manage the outage. Non-urgent and elective procedures were initially rescheduled, but Sinai Hospital was able to resume them in the early afternoon.

At Francesca’s clothing store in Pikesville, assistant manager Galina Gavin had no idea what had happened until she got to work, and the registers wouldn’t turn on. She couldn’t ring customers up all day.

"I had a guest come in and she kind of explained to me, 'The Loft is closed, and over here is closed, and I heard they're grounding planes,' and I'm like, oh my gosh this is way bigger than I thought it was gonna be.”

At this point, there’s no word when the issue will be resolved, but some companies are reporting that systems are gradually coming back online.

According to the University of Maryland Medical System, progress has been made in getting their IT systems back up to normal, but it could take a few more days.

"At this time, all UMMS member organizations have started to transition away from downtime procedures to normal operation as we recover from this incident," a spokesperson tells WMAR-2 News. "We anticipate that full recovery will take a few days, but we remain open to care for patient needs at this time."