Microsoft outage hits hospitals, GPs, schools and police across UK

NHS suffering ‘serious’ and widespread disruption, while people are told of possible delays in receiving prescriptions

Vital services including hospitals and police have been hit by a global Microsoft outage that left NHS staff resorting to paper records and fuelled concerns about an over-reliance on a small number of tech companies

A day of widespread disruption sent some sectors back to the 1990s, with court staff looking for fax machines and rail travellers being warned they may not be able to rely on digital tickets.

Schools, universities and businesses were all also affected by the global outage effecting Microsoft’s 365 suite of products, which began late on Thursday evening and hit access to emails and calendars.

The main problem across the NHS was confirming appointment times, but pharmacists also warned of possible delays to prescriptions, while a union reported that ambulance services had suffered a “serious impact”.

Police forces across the UK told people to contact them by telephone if they needed to report crimes, instead of using online forms.

Tim Clement-Jones, former hair of the House of Lords artificial intelligence select committee said the widespread outages of vital government services were an “I- told-you-so moment” highlighting Britain’s dependence on a small number of US tech companies.

Lord Clement-Jones referenced a Guardian investigation in September that found senior police officials accepted the risk “US government insider” and foreign actors could compromise sensitive data as they moved key systems on to Microsoft.

“It is not a surprise that there is this dependency on a single ‘hyperscaler’, like Microsoft. I’ve got quite a lot of time for Microsoft as a business, but you don’t just put your eggs in one basket, and I’m afraid that’s what the government has been doing for some considerable period of time,” he said.

The UK government said it spent roughly £1.9bn on Microsoft software licences in 2025 and hundreds of millions more on Amazon and Google. There are no publicly available figures for how much key infrastructure is hosted on these platforms.

Documents previously obtained by the Guardian have indicated the police also believed thathosting their data on Microsoft’s platform put vital services at risk in case of an global outage – suggesting that first responders needed to consider backup options in place.

In a warning echoed by others, Clement-Jones said the government had “just blindly procured”, adding: “They haven’t really seriously thought about the resilience required in our civil service – in our forms of email, communication, data storage, and so on. “The easy thing to do is to buy the full suite from Microsoft.”

Dame Chi Onwurah, chair of the Commons science and technology committee, warned the outage highlighted the lack of resilience in the UK’s digital infrastructure and the dangers to security, economy and public services.

She referenced a report by her committee earlier this year which found that Britain was hugely dependent on a small number of US-based technology providers for its public services, preventing homegrown alternatives from developing.

“In its response, the government could not tell us how much it was spending on IT and digital or who it was spending it with. Without even knowing this, how can we protect against vendor lock-in or achieve the resilience and digital sovereignty the UK needs?” she said.

Downing Street said it was seeking to establish the “full picture” of Microsoft outages and urged the public to follow advice on “alternative ways to get in touch” where services were disrupted.

The problems began late on Thursday afternoon and users have been unable to access many of Microsoft’s most popular services. Thousands worldwide reported they were unable to send and receive emails through Outlook.

The Microsoft executive vice-president Charles Lamanna said the outages did not appear to be the result of a cyber-attack. On Friday morning, the firm said it was seeing “early signs of stabilisation”, later issuing an update that it was seeing email traffic being gradually restored.

NHS staff arriving at work on Friday morning reported being unable to access email, affecting their ability to deliver healthcare in hospitals and GP surgeries.

In some cases, staff said they were able to use their phones to access Microsoft Teams, which is heavily relied upon in the healthcare sector, but meetings were having to be cancelled across the board.

An NHS England spokesperson said: “Local NHS services are enacting longstanding measures to manage IT outages and ensure critical services and appointments can continue for patients today – including using other IT systems or paper records where possible.”

While travel disruption was limited and airports ran services as normal, National Rail warned that people may not be able to access tickets that have been emailed to them, advising customers to try to access them alternatively on websites or on apps.

The already backlogged court system was hit, with juries in some cases being sent home early or prisoners not being sent to court. At Minshull Street crown court in Manchester, Judge Maurice Greene said staff had been looking for a fax machine earlier in the morning.

“What we are learning is the dangers of our reliability on computer systems and platforms, and so on,” he told jurors before sending them home.

“Many institutions rely on Microsoft 365 as do the court and various institutions connected to the court, so there have all been sort of delays because of this. I would say sorry but it’s not my fault.”

“It may be Mr Gates’s fault but I don’t think he is going to come and apologise,” he added, referring to the cofounder of Microsoft, who officially resigned from Microsoft’s board of directors six years ago.

Businesses meanwhile braced for the impact of economic damage while the UK’s top financial regulators, the Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority, were hit by the Outlook outage, although a spokesperson for the bank said “all critical operations” were running normally.

However, the turmoil comes on the busiest day of the week for mortgage completions and there were also warnings that digital tickets for events could be affected, with Cheltenham racecourse urging visitors to arrive early.

Engineers from the government were working with Microsoft to assess the impact of the outage, according to a minister, while the Welsh government said it was putting contingency plans in place.

A Downing Street spokesperson said the prime minister was being kept updated on the situation, while individual departments would be able to rely on contingency plans where necessary.

They declined to say whether Downing Street itself had been affected, adding: “There are contingency measures in place at No 10, as there are with all government departments, to ensure that work can go on as usual.”

Asked about the effect specifically on the NHS, they said it appeared all clinical and operation systems were working effectively.

However, Britain’s minister for defence readiness and industry, Luke Pollard, said earlier in the morning that the outage demonstrated the need for “greater resilience” against technology failures.

Pollard told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “My appetite for disruption when it comes to using my phone is virtually zero. I imagine that’s the case for every one of your listeners, that people want it to work all the time, every time, and we’re seeing more disruption from those tech companies. That’s partly because we’ve become more dependent on technology.”

The government response was criticised by opposition MPs, with the Liberal Democrats describing it as a “national resilience failure” and calling for a minister to urgently come to brief MPs in parliament.

“No single provider should have such a major impact across the NHS, police and other frontline services,” said the Lib Dem Cabinet Office spokesperson Lisa Smart.

Police forces across the country said the Microsoft outage was having an impact on the ability to report crimes using official websites. “If your report is time-critical but not an emergency, please call 101. In an emergency, call 999,” said the Metropolitan police in London, as other forces issued similar advice.

School inspections in England were disrupted after Ofsted said it was unable to receive emails, as hundreds of schools, colleges and universities across the UK were affected.

The higher education sector was braced to be the hardest hit, with many UK universities relying on Outlook, OneDrive and other Microsoft services for administration and communications, although Teams appeared to be functioning for some online meetings.