Microsoft outage leaves courts and Whitehall in the dark

A global Microsoft outage disrupted Outlook, Teams and Copilot, leaving parts of the UK government, courts, police and health services struggling to work. It raised uncertainty over whether civil court judgments due on Friday could be delivered, while highlighting how dependent public services and businesses are on a small number of digital systems.

Microsoft said servers had unexpectedly become unavailable, putting extra pressure on the remaining infrastructure, and ruled out a cyber attack. The disruption had lasted nearly 17 hours across Britain and Europe; some judgments could be delayed until Monday, HMRC email was down, and NHS 111 referrals faced backlogs. The Met advised people to call 101 for urgent non-emergency matters or 999 in an emergency, while the Cabinet Office was unaffected because it uses Google.