Microsoft has confirmed that its services are fully restored after a major global outage disrupted Outlook emails, Teams and AI services for hundreds of thousands of people worldwide on Thursday and Friday. The IT failure affected police forces, the NHS, businesses and schools, including many organisations in the North East.
North East organisations affected
Northumbria Police and Durham Constabulary were among those impacted, with the forces not receiving reports made through their websites. NHS trusts also reported issues. Local authorities including Newcastle City Council, Northumberland County Council, Gateshead Council and Durham County Council experienced disruption to their email systems, with messages shared on social media alerting the public to the problems.
Similar statements were issued by Durham University, Northumbrian Water, Newcastle Theatre Royal, Newcastle College, Newcastle Hospitals Trust and Tyne Theatre & Opera House.
Restoration and cause
On Saturday morning, Microsoft said it had restored service to the remaining customers impacted by one of the worst IT failures in years. 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 center.”
Northumbria Police said on its social media channels: "The technical issues affecting online reporting through our website have now been resolved. Thank you all for your patience."
The UK Government and its counterparts worldwide were forced to put in place contingency measures due to the outage, while Microsoft worked to restore email, messaging and other services after they began to go down from 6pm GMT on Thursday. Microsoft said on Friday the outage was caused by a “technical issue not related to cyber or AI agents”.
Government response and wider impact
Government cyber minister Baroness Lloyd of Effra said the issue mainly affected back-office functions, with contingency measures put in place. She acknowledged there had been “limited reports of impact on frontline service delivery” and the incident had been “inconvenient and disruptive”. The minister said she had spoken to Microsoft UK’s chief executive, Darren Hardman, about the situation.
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 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. NHS England said health service staff were “enacting long-standing measures” to overcome IT outages, including using paper records.
