Councils and public services hit by global Microsoft outage

Detailed summary

The tech company says it is working to resolve the problem.

A worldwide Microsoft outage has disrupted millions of users and is now hitting the operations of dozens of London institutions.

Services including Teams, Outlook, and Copilot have all been impacted by the outage, with the tech giant now scrambling to find a resolution.

The outage was first reported at around 6pm on Thursday night, but more than 12 hours later, a fix has not yet been found.

Microsoft said its attempts to fix the issue are not “taking as expected”, but confirmed that the incident was not caused by a cyber-security attack.

In London, several services and institutions have all been hit by the outage, including emergency services, schools, and sectors of government.

A heatmap on Downdetector shows that London is the region with the highest number of reported outages since the problem first emerged on Thursday evening.

Microsoft said in its latest update that it is seeing "early signs of stabilisation", though services are not yet back up to normal.

Experts have criticised the tech giant for struggling to resolve the issue - which is understood to be caused by “overloaded servers.”

Prof Awais Rashid, Professor of Cyber Security, University of Bristol, called it “concerning” that Microsoft had not yet found a fix for the outage, explaining that organisations fundamentally rely on the tech giant’s services.

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