Silicon Valley homeless nonprofit sues Microsoft over disrupted email access

One of Silicon Valley’s largest homelessness nonprofits has sued Microsoft to compel the tech giant to restore access to the nonprofit’s email accounts, claiming the nearly month-long outage has impeded its day-to-day operations and ability to connect homeless people with needed services.

In a civil complaint filed in Santa Clara County last week, the Santa Clara-based nonprofit LifeMoves claimed it has been locked out of its Microsoft email accounts and other cloud applications since Dec. 11. The nonprofit said it doesn’t know how it lost access or whether it has been hacked.

Despite multiple attempts to prove that it owns the accounts, LifeMoves claims Microsoft has repeatedly declined to restore access.

“Without access to their emails and these services, LifeMoves employees and staff have also not been able to provide much needed support services to thousands of clients who need support daily to help break their cycle of homelessness,” the nonprofit said in the complaint.

In a statement, LifeMoves said Microsoft directed the nonprofit to file the complaint “as part of a security protection and account recovery process.”

“We continue to take the appropriate steps in an effort to maintain continuity of operations and protect sensitive data and are monitoring the situation closely,” the nonprofit said. “We also continue to work with Microsoft to fully resolve the matter.”

Microsoft did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Last summer, a major Microsoft outage caused more than 1,000 flight cancellations in the U.S. and impacted users and companies across the globe.

Each day, LifeMoves serves around 1,200 homeless or formerly homeless people, either through street outreach or in one of its more than two dozen shelter and service sites across Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, according to the nonprofit. It receives private donations and contracts with public agencies to connect unhoused residents with housing, social services, medical care, food, clothing and other necessities.

Santa Clara County homelessness officials said they were aware of LifeMove’s situation.

“The Office of Supportive Housing has been working closely with LifeMoves management and operations staff to mitigate impacts to services, such as sharing information about shelter referrals from the county’s centralized hotline by phone,” said KJ Kaminski, head of the Office of Supportive Housing. “Unhoused residents were referred to LifeMoves shelters without any issues throughout the email outage.”

In recent years, Washington-based Microsoft has committed at least $750 million to build affordable housing and support homelessness programs in the Seattle area. Bay Area tech companies, including Google, Meta and Apple, have also set aside billions for similar causes. In both regions, the tech industry has been blamed for driving up housing costs that have exacerbated the homelessness crisis, as companies have flooded the areas with high-paying jobs, and new housing construction hasn’t kept up with demand.

LifeMove’s struggle to regain access to its emails and applications should sound familiar to anyone who has been locked out of an online account.

According to the complaint, the issue stems from the fact that LifeMoves registered them under a different website domain eight years ago, when the nonprofit operated under the names Innvision Shelter Network and InnVision The Way Home. Microsoft told LifeMoves it needed verification from the company that registered the old website domain, the complaint said. But that company said it can’t verify that LifeMoves is the owner of the accounts without access to an email from the InnVision domain, which LifeMoves can no longer access, the nonprofit said.

LifeMoves has asked the judge in the case to issue a temporary restraining order requiring Microsoft to immediately restore the accounts ahead of any hearings. It is unclear when the court could respond to LifeMove’s request.