A global Microsoft outage has disrupted a number of organisations in the North East, including police forces, councils and health services, leaving users worldwide without access to emails and Teams.
The outage began late on Thursday afternoon and continued into Friday, according to reports. The tech giant said it was working with “urgency” to find a fix for the issue, which caused widespread disruption affecting governments, banks, police forces and health services.
Microsoft response and impact
Microsoft said it had tried several solutions to mitigate the problems, including isolating parts of its infrastructure and shifting traffic to alternate routes. In its latest update on Microsoft 365 products, it said it was seeing “positive results for server stability”.
“We’ll continue to monitor its progress and are working to expand it to servers supporting active regions coming online,” the firm said. The group stressed it was “not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident”. Microsoft executive vice-president Charles Lamanna said the outages did not appear to be the result of a cyber attack.
North East services affected
A number of police forces in the UK, including in the North East, were not receiving reports made through their websites. Northumbria Police said: "We are currently experiencing technical issues, meaning we're unable to receive reports online via our website. Please be patient with us as we hope to have it back up and running as soon as possible." Durham Constabulary said this issue was also affecting their online reporting.
Local authorities, including Newcastle City Council, Northumberland County Council, Gateshead Council and Durham County Council, also experienced disruption to their email systems. Messages were shared on social media by a number of organisations, alerting members of the public to the issues.
Government response
A UK Government spokesperson said: “We are working closely with Microsoft to assess any impact on government services, with robust contingency plans in place to minimise disruption.” The full list of North East services affected by the outage includes Durham University, Northumbrian Water, Newcastle Theatre Royal, Newcastle College, Newcastle Hospitals Trust and Tyne Theatre & Opera House.
