Millions of people globally were unable to access Microsoft 365 services, including emails and Teams, after an outage that began on Thursday evening and lasted for over 21 hours. The disruption affected a wide range of organisations, from businesses and government agencies to Microsoft's own employees.
In the UK, police services, ambulances, hospitals, and schools were among those reporting issues. The NHS, which uses Microsoft 365 in England, confirmed that various services had been disrupted. The UK government stated it was working with Microsoft to assess the impact and had contingency plans in place.
Microsoft indicated the outage was caused by a configuration error, not a cyber-attack, and reported meaningful signs of recovery by Friday midday GMT. While improvements were noted, with email queues significantly reduced, some users may still experience issues.
Experts have highlighted that such outages underscore a growing dependence on a few large US tech companies for critical services.