Microsoft has confirmed that its services are back up and running following a major worldwide outage that caused disruption for public services, businesses, and organisations across the UK and beyond.
The tech giant announced on Saturday morning (November 14) that it had resolved the problems affecting its remaining customers, ending one of the biggest IT disruptions in recent years.
The outage left millions of people struggling to access essential Microsoft services, including Outlook and Teams, while police forces, the NHS, schools, and courts were among those affected.
Microsoft confirms restoration
In an update published on its Microsoft 365 status page, the company 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 center.
The problems first began at around 6pm GMT on Thursday (November 12), with Microsoft spending much of Friday (November 13) working to get its systems back online. The disruption also prompted governments in the UK and elsewhere to introduce contingency arrangements while services were affected.
Technical fault, not a security breach
Microsoft had previously confirmed that the incident was the result of a technical fault rather than a security breach, stating that it was a "technical issue not related to cyber or AI agents".
Government cyber minister Baroness Lloyd of Effra said the disruption had largely affected back-office operations, although there were also some reports of problems with services used by the public.
She acknowledged there had been "limited reports of impact on frontline service delivery" and described the incident as "inconvenient and disruptive". The minister also confirmed she had spoken with Microsoft's UK chief executive, Darren Hardman, about the situation.
Impact on UK services
The scale of the disruption became clear on Thursday evening, with monitoring website Downdetector recording a sharp increase in complaints from users unable to access Microsoft Teams from around 6.15pm in the UK. In the US, more than 130,000 people reported problems with Outlook at the height of the disruption.
As well as email and messaging services, Microsoft's Copilot AI assistant and other Microsoft 365 products were affected. Other popular AI platforms, including OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude, also experienced disruption.
In Scotland, Police Scotland was among the organisations to report difficulties, warning that its email system and online contact forms had been affected. The force shared an update on X, formerly Twitter, on Friday, saying: "Due to the global Microsoft outage, our online forms are affected, including ContactUs. We are unable to receive any emails, and there may be a delay in responding to any forms sent to us in the last 24 hours as this outage continues."
Several Scottish councils also experienced problems with their systems, including the City of Edinburgh Council, which warned residents that it was temporarily unable to send or receive emails. A council spokesperson said: "Due to a worldwide Microsoft outage, we are unable to send or receive emails at this time, and some of our online forms are not available. If you need to get in touch with us, please contact us by telephone."
Scottish Government response
The Scottish Government also activated its resilience arrangements to monitor the situation and understand how public services were being affected.
Holyrood Justice Secretary Neil Gray confirmed officials were working with organisations across the country to assess the impact while ensuring essential services could continue. Mr Gray said: "The Scottish Government’s resilience operation has been activated to assess the main impacts on Scotland of the global outage impacting some of Microsoft’s Cloud Services."
"We are liaising with partners across public services as they assess the impacts and continue providing key frontline services. While this is currently impacting some of the Scottish Government’s corporate systems, including access to emails, the Scottish Government remains operational and business continues."
