A global Microsoft outage has disrupted the UK government and courts system, forcing officials to implement contingency plans. The outage, which has affected Outlook, Teams, and Copilot, has lasted nearly 17 hours across Britain and Europe.
Questions remain regarding civil court judgments due to be handed down on Friday morning, as these are typically delivered remotely via email. A plan is reportedly being put in place to ensure access to legal decisions, though some judgments might be delayed until Monday.
Government departments, including HMRC and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS), have reported email outages. HMRC advises people to use its online services or phone lines. Several police forces, including the Metropolitan Police, have also reported disruption, with the Met advising the public to call 101 for non-emergency matters or 999 in an emergency.
NHS services have also been affected, with reports of problems accessing Rapid Health, an online consultation platform. Rachel Harrison, national secretary at the GMB union, stated the outage is having a "serious impact" on ambulance and NHS trusts, potentially creating a backlog in 111 services.
Defence minister Luke Pollard confirmed that government engineers are working with Microsoft to assess the disruption. Microsoft stated it is continuing to work on recovering its frontend servers and implementing traffic optimisation, ruling out a cyber attack as the cause.