Microsoft outage disrupts UK NHS, police, schools and government services
A global outage of Microsoft 365 services has affected Outlook, Teams and other tools, prompting UK health trusts, police forces, schools and government departments to activate contingency plans and advise users to rely on phone communication.
A worldwide outage of Microsoft 365 that began on Thursday evening has caused widespread disruption to Outlook, Teams and related services for millions of users, including several UK public sector organisations.
The National Health Service (NHS) reported that trusts such as the Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust and NHS Grampian were unable to access email and Teams, advising patients to call rather than email and confirming that clinical appointments would continue. Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust added that the issue primarily affected staff email and did not impact patient care systems.
A government spokesperson said officials were working closely with Microsoft and had "robust contingency plans in place to minimise disruption" to public services. Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry Luke Pollard told Times Radio that engineers were assessing the impact on government systems.
Police forces across England and Wales, including Hertfordshire, Dorset, South Wales and Dyfed-Powys, warned the public to report non-emergency crimes by phone rather than through online forms, citing the outage's effect on their email and web-based reporting tools.
Several schools in London and elsewhere advised parents to contact them by telephone for attendance matters, noting limited access to Outlook and Teams.
Microsoft said the problem appeared to stem from server configuration settings and that a software patch was delivering "positive results for server stability". The company reiterated that it sees no evidence of a cyber-attack and will issue a post-incident report once the service is fully restored.