A global Microsoft outage has disrupted NHS services, police forces, and Britain’s electricity grid, prompting warnings about the UK’s reliance on American technology companies for critical infrastructure. The disruption, which began on Thursday, has affected users in 74 countries, impacting Outlook, Teams, and its AI assistant Copilot.
Britain’s National Energy System Operator (Neso) resorted to fax machines to communicate with power stations. The Metropolitan Police warned that officers could not access emails and some online crime reports might not reach them, though emergency response services remained operational. NHS England stated the outage was "inevitably" disrupting staff, with some trusts using paper records and alternative IT systems.
Microsoft reported making "additional progress toward service recovery" on Friday, with traffic gradually being restored in parts of Asia-Pacific. However, the company cautioned that some users might continue to experience intermittent problems as it worked to clear email backlogs. Microsoft attributed the outage to servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable, placing strain on remaining infrastructure, and stated there was no evidence of malicious activity.
Mark Boost, chief executive of British cloud provider Civo, commented that the outage highlighted the risks of concentrating essential public services within a single technology ecosystem. Nicky Stewart, senior adviser to the Open Cloud Coalition, noted that the disruption underscored the economic costs of businesses becoming locked into individual technology providers.