A global Microsoft outage that began late on Thursday afternoon continued into Friday morning, leaving users worldwide without access to emails and Teams and affecting a number of organisations in the North East.
Thousands of people worldwide reported they were unable to send and receive emails through Outlook. Teams was also affected for many, with Microsoft's Copilot AI assistant and other Microsoft 365 services also disrupted.
Cause and Response
Microsoft executive vice-president Charles Lamanna said the outages did not appear to be the result of a cyber attack. The firm 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,” it said. The group stressed it was “not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident”.
Police Forces Affected
A number of police forces in the UK, including in the North East, are 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. In the meantime, if you need to report an incident, please send us a DM on our social media channels. If you cannot submit a report that way, ring 101. In an emergency always call 999."
Durham Constabulary said this issue was also affecting their online reporting.
Local Councils and University
Newcastle City Council shared a message explaining the impact on its services. It said: "We are currently experiencing some disruption to our Microsoft services due to a wider outage. This is affecting several of our systems, including our email service and some of our other online services. If you need to contact us urgently, we would recommend calling our Contact Centre, where our team will be happy to assist wherever possible. Please bear with us while this issue is being resolved."
Northumberland County Council made this statement: "Some council systems have been affected by the current issues being experienced globally across Microsoft products. This may have an impact on how residents contact the council. We are working hard to understand the extent of the issue and will provide an update as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience."
Durham University said on Friday: "There is a global outage at Microsoft who are working urgently to fix it. This has affected email & calendars & SharePoint at Durham. Teams currently has some functionality, but not complete. We're taking steps to address this at a local level. Check back here for updates."
