NHS patients are facing delays getting prescriptions as a global Microsoft outage continues to disrupt health services and other critical sectors, leaving millions without access to emails and Teams.
Microsoft reported seeing "early signs of stabilisation" but confirmed that services have not yet been fully restored following the widespread technical failure that began late on Thursday.
Impact on public services
The outage has severely impacted vital public infrastructure, including health services, police forces, governments, and banks across the globe. Microsoft stated it is working with "urgency" to resolve the issue.
On its Microsoft 365 status page, the firm said: "We are seeing early signs of stabilisation, but service capacity has not yet returned to normal levels and health remains variable as traffic is carefully reintroduced."
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."
Police and pharmacy warnings
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. The National Pharmacy Association said there may also be delays to some NHS patients getting their prescriptions, as the outage is affecting NHS email systems.
The issue began late on Thursday, with users unable to access many of its most popular services. Thousands worldwide reported being unable to send and receive emails through Outlook, while Teams has also been affected for many. Microsoft's Copilot AI assistant and other Microsoft 365 services are also disrupted.
Scale of the outage
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 last night.
Microsoft executive vice-president Charles Lamanna said the outages did not appear to be the result of a cyber attack. The firm had earlier said fixes to resolve the problem were not working "as expected", but in its latest update on Microsoft 365 products, it gave some hope of a solution.
It said: "Our primary mitigation path continues to focus on service stability and controlled recovery. As part of this effort, we are extending the email timeout window to 48 hours to help protect delayed messages while service recovery continues."
The company had previously said it was seeing "positive results for server stability" from a patch put in place to fix the issue. The group said it was "not aware of any malicious activity that is causing 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."
Users from 74 countries reported issues with Microsoft services in the space of an hour on Thursday, according to Downdetector. Problems were flagged from countries including the UK, US, India and New Zealand. Reports about Outlook peaked at more than 2,000 times their normal level, the monitoring site added.
On Friday, users from about 60 countries, mainly in Europe and Asia, continue to record trouble. Courts, charities and banks around the world have also reported Microsoft outages.
