A MAJOR worldwide Microsoft outage has caused widespread disruption to businesses and public services, leaving councils, schools, police forces and NHS organisations struggling to access emails and essential computer systems.
The technical failure, which began at around 6pm on Thursday (November 12), has affected Microsoft’s Outlook email service, Teams communication platform and other Microsoft 365 applications.
The problems continued into Friday morning (November 13), with millions of people potentially affected across the world.
According to outage monitoring website Downdetector, problems have been reported in 74 countries and territories, including the UK, United States and Australia.
Across Britain, local authorities have reported difficulties accessing email systems, while schools have been forced to ask parents to telephone rather than email when reporting pupil absences or making enquiries.
Police forces have also experienced disruption, with some warning that online crime reports and email communications are not being received.
NHS services have been affected, with GP surgeries reporting difficulties accessing emails, processing online enquiries and communicating with other healthcare providers.
Some medical practices have advised patients to telephone or visit their surgeries for urgent matters rather than rely on electronic communications.
Universities and businesses have also reported problems accessing online calendars, shared documents and Microsoft Teams, disrupting meetings and everyday operations.
Microsoft said the failure was linked to unusually heavy demand on parts of its infrastructure after servers unexpectedly became unavailable, placing additional pressure on remaining systems.
Engineers have been working to restore services by restarting affected servers, redirecting network traffic and increasing capacity.
However, the company acknowledged that some initial recovery measures had not produced the expected improvements.
In an update on Friday morning, Microsoft said there were early signs of stabilisation, although services had not yet returned to normal.
The technology giant also confirmed that it had found no indication of malicious activity or a cyberattack behind the incident.
The Government said it was working closely with Microsoft to assess the impact on public services, with contingency arrangements being used to minimise disruption.
Defence minister Luke Pollard said the incident highlighted the importance of ensuring essential services had reliable backup systems in place.
The widespread failure has raised fresh questions about the growing dependence of public services and businesses on cloud-based technology and the potential consequences when major systems fail.
People experiencing difficulties contacting schools, councils, healthcare providers or other organisations by email are being advised to use telephone services where available, particularly for urgent enquiries.
Microsoft has not yet confirmed when all affected services will be fully restored.
