Microsoft has said its services are now being “gradually restored” after a global outage affected millions of users around the world. Customers have been unable to send and receive emails through Outlook since services went down at around 6pm on Thursday.
Impact Across the UK
In the UK, the outage has hit police forces, the NHS, businesses and schools, in one of the worst IT failures for years. The UK government and its counterparts worldwide have been forced to put contingency measures in place.
The tech giant has been scrambling to restore email, Teams and other services since they went down. In its latest update, Microsoft said services were “being gradually restored”, with users seeing some email services beginning to come back. The company said improvements were being made to email access, but “some users may continue to experience intermittent issues”.
Restoration Efforts and Monitoring
The outage has been ongoing since 6pm UK time on Thursday. Microsoft stressed it was working with “urgency” to find a full fix for the issue, which has caused widespread disruption since late Thursday.
On its Microsoft 365 status page, the firm said: “Traffic is being gradually restored, and we’re seeing improvements in key customer scenarios, including mailbox access and delayed email processing. Reducing email queues and backlogs remains a priority, and the extended 48-hour email timeout window remains in place to help protect delayed messages as delivery catches up.”
Monitoring website Downdetector first showed a spike in users reporting problems with Microsoft Teams in the UK at about 6.15pm on Thursday. At its peak last night, more than 130,000 people in the US reported Outlook issues. Users from 74 countries reported issues with Microsoft services in the space of an hour on Thursday, according to Downdetector, with reports about Outlook peaking at more than 2,000 times their normal level.
Wider Disruptions and Responses
Teams has also been affected for many, and the tech giant’s Copilot AI assistant and other Microsoft 365 services are also disrupted. Other AI chat services have been disrupted too, such as OpenAI’s Chat GPT and Anthropic’s Claude.
Microsoft executive vice-president Charles Lamanna said the outages did not appear to be the result of a cyber attack. Police forces have said they are unable to receive crime reports online and are urging people to call either 101 or 999 to make any urgent reports.
NHS England said health service staff are “enacting long-standing measures” to overcome IT outages, including using paper records. It asked patients to continue contacting services such as 999 and 111 as necessary, and attend appointments as usual. The National Pharmacy Association said there may be delays to some NHS patients getting their prescriptions, as the outage is affecting NHS email systems.
Councils have also said some services are being impacted. National Rail said the outage may be affecting customers’ ability to access their train tickets via email.
Microsoft previously said it was seeing “positive results” from a patch put in place to fix the issue. The group stressed it had “no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident”. It added: “We will continue to treat this with urgency until full mitigation and we will share a full post-incident report with root cause and defence-in-depth actions after recovery is complete.”
Tina McKenzie, national chair of the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), said businesses would be left “floundering by this mass outage”. She added: “We’re calling on small businesses’ clients to be patient and understanding at this tricky moment, falling on Friday 13th of all days. Small firms should also be aware that criminals and fraudsters may try to take advantage of them with fake offers of ‘help’.”
