Microsoft ‘deeply sorry’ for disruption caused by major global outage

Microsoft said it is “deeply sorry” for disruption caused by a major global outage that affected police forces, the NHS, businesses and schools in one of the worst IT failures for years.

The technology giant said on Friday afternoon it was “seeing broad recovery” across its services and that the outage was caused by a “technical issue not related to cyber or AI agents”.

The US-based firm said it was restoring services “gradually” because of “the scale of demand”, with users reporting email services beginning to come back.

The UK Government and its counterparts worldwide were forced to put in place contingency measures due to the outage, while Microsoft scrambled to restore email, messaging and other services after they began to go down from 6pm GMT on Thursday.

Government cyber minister Baroness Lloyd of Effra said the outage mainly affected back-office functions, with contingency measures put in place.

But she acknowledged there had been “limited reports of impact on frontline service delivery” and the incident had been “inconvenient and disruptive”.

The minister said she had spoken to Microsoft UK’s chief executive, Darren Hardman, about the situation.

In a statement posted on X on Friday afternoon, Microsoft said: “We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners. We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously.

“We are seeing broad recovery and stability across our services.

“This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents. The incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change.

“We have addressed the underlying issue and continue to restore service to remaining customers and regions.

“Given the scale of demand, we restored services gradually, validating stability at each stage. While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration.

“We will provide a full post-incident report once our review is complete.”

Millions of its customers were unable to send and receive emails through Outlook, with Teams also affected for many users, and the tech giant’s Copilot AI assistant and other Microsoft 365 services also disrupted.

Other AI chat services have been disrupted, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.

Police forces said they were unable to receive crime reports online and urged people to call either 101 or 999 to make any urgent reports.

NHS England said health service staff were “enacting long-standing measures” to overcome IT outages, including using paper records, but asked patients to continue contacting services such as 999 and 111 as necessary, and attend appointments as usual.

The National Pharmacy Association said there may be delays to some NHS patients getting their prescriptions because of the impact on NHS email systems.

Councils also said some services were hit, while National Rail said some passengers may struggle to access their train tickets via email.

Tina McKenzie, national chairman of the Federation of Small Businesses, said businesses would be left “floundering by this mass outage”.

She added: “Small firms should also be aware that criminals and fraudsters may try to take advantage of them with fake offers of ‘help’.”