Microsoft outage disrupts UK GPs, police and other public services

Patients and members of the public may face delays until service is fully restored, and the incident has renewed debate over reliance on a few large providers.

A worldwide Microsoft outage has hit British public services, with NHS England telling patients to keep their appointments unless told otherwise and police forces in England and Wales asking people to phone in time-critical but non-emergency matters because online forms may be unavailable. Microsoft attributed the disruption to a large number of its servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable, which pushed the remaining servers into overload, and said service was being restored gradually though some disruption could persist. The affected Outlook, Teams and Copilot tools are used by roughly 430 million people globally, and the knock-on effects have reached GP surgeries, pharmacies, schools, universities, Royal Mail and parliamentary accounts. Cyber-security experts and Microsoft have ruled out an attack as the cause, and commentators are using the event to argue for communication channels that do not depend on a few large providers.