Microsoft has confirmed its service has been fully restored after a major global outage saw police forces, the NHS, courts, schools and businesses affected. The technology giant said on Saturday it had restored service to the remaining customers impacted by one of the worst IT failures in years.
Restoration and Cause
On its Microsoft 365 status page, the US-based firm said: "We have completed our efforts to address the underlying issue of the incident and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions. Further updates can be found at MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin centre."
Microsoft on Friday said the outage was caused by a "technical issue not related to cyber or AI agents". Services began to go down from 6pm GMT on Thursday, affecting email, messaging and other tools.
Impact on Public Services
The UK government and its counterparts worldwide were forced to put in place contingency measures due to the outage. Police forces in England and Wales said on Friday they were unable to receive crime reports online. Merseyside Police said online forms had been affected, meaning members of the public would be unable to submit reports through the usual channels.
A message on the force website said: "Due to a global Microsoft service issue, some online form submissions may be affected. If your report is time-critical but not an emergency, please call 101. In an emergency, call 999."
NHS England said health service staff were "enacting long-standing measures" to overcome IT outages, including using paper records. Government cyber minister Baroness Lloyd of Effra said the issue mainly affected back-office functions, with contingency measures put in place.
Scale of Disruption
Monitoring website Downdetector first showed a spike in users reporting problems with Microsoft Teams in the UK at about 6.15pm on Thursday, with more than 130,000 reporting Outlook issues in the US at its peak on Thursday night. Millions of customers were unable to send and receive emails through Outlook, with Teams, the tech giant's Copilot AI assistant and other Microsoft 365 services also affected for many.
Other AI chat services were disrupted, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude. Baroness Lloyd acknowledged there had been "limited reports of impact on frontline service delivery" and the incident had been "inconvenient and disruptive". She said she had spoken to Microsoft UK's chief executive, Darren Hardman, about the situation.
