Greater Manchester Police (GMP) has warned that online crime reports and other form submissions may be affected by ongoing global Microsoft outages. The force said on its website that some online form submissions may be impacted due to a global Microsoft service issue.
GMP advised that if a report is time-critical but not an emergency, callers should use 101. In an emergency, the force said to call 999.
Global Disruption to Microsoft Services
The outage began late on Thursday afternoon, leaving hundreds of thousands of users worldwide without access to emails and Teams. Microsoft admitted that fixes were not going as expected, with thousands reporting they were unable to send and receive emails through Outlook.
Teams has also been affected for many users, along with the tech giant's Copilot AI assistant and other Microsoft 365 services. Monitoring website Downdetector first showed a spike in users reporting problems with Microsoft Teams in the UK at around 6.15pm on Thursday, with nearly 130,000 reporting Outlook issues at its peak.
Company Response and Impact
Microsoft executive vice-president Charles Lamanna said the outages did not appear to be the result of a cyber attack. The firm said it had tried several solutions to mitigate the problems, including isolating parts of its infrastructure and shifting traffic to alternate routes.
In a statement, the company said: "We've monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed that change is not taking as expected." Affected products included Teams, Copilot, Outlook emails and some aspects of its Cloud services.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, also reported issues. In a statement on its website, OpenAI said: "We're investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors where new connections may be broken and tools are not working as expected. We'll share an update when we know more."
Multiple governments around the world also reported Microsoft outages, including in Australia, India and Japan.
