Amid Microsoft Outage, US Jail Unable To Release Prisoners: 'Pay Bond Money In Person'

Amid the ongoing Microsoft outage, the Arapahoe County Detention Facility in Colorado, USA, reported that technical disruption had prevented the jail from releasing inmates. Since the facility relies on Outlook email notifications to verify the money posted for bond, the jail officials said they could not release the inmates unless the money was paid in person.

"The Microsoft outage is affecting online bond payments for individuals being held at the Arapahoe County Detention Facility," the jail's official X (formerly Twitter) handle posted.

Jail officials instructed anyone looking to post bond for inmates to either wait until email services resume or pay in person.

"Because of the outage, jail officials are not receiving the email notifications needed to process online bond payments. Until Outlook email is restored, anyone needing to post bond for immediate release must do so in person at the jail. We apologise for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience."

As the post went viral, social media users were amused by the absurdity of the situation. "Imagine staying in jail for another day because Microsoft can't figure their sh*t out," said one user, while another added: "There's gotta be a database that can be accessed to confirm payments. Ain't no way the software is fully dependent on email notifications."

A third commented: "Imagine getting arrested, calling someone to bail you out, they pay the bond… and then Microsoft Outlook decides you're not going anywhere."

A fourth said: "So maybe relying on Outlook for everything wasn't such a good idea after all. People are literally stuck in jail because of it."

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Microsoft Unable To Fix

The global outage, which has lasted well over 12 hours, started late at night on Thursday (Nov 12) with Microsoft claiming that the issue was "elevated load" on its infrastructure, meaning its servers had higher-than-normal stress.

Microsoft has in its latest statement said it is still working to fix the outage. "We're continuing to work on recovering our frontend servers while implementing further traffic optimisation actions to improve service stability and increase capacity," it said in a post on X.

This is not the first time Microsoft has faced such an outage. In 2024, a faulty software update distributed by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike crashed thousands of Microsoft Windows devices globally. Experts described it as one of the largest IT disruptions in history at the time.