A major global Microsoft outage disrupted hospitals, schools and police forces across the UK on Thursday, 13 November, leaving staff locked out of email and core computer systems and forcing many services to fall back on pen and paper.
The outage hit Outlook, Microsoft 365 and Teams, the tools thousands of public services rely on every day. In the NHS, the disruption was described as widespread and serious, with staff unable to reach the email and IT systems they use to care for patients. Some hospitals cancelled appointments, including caesarean sections, because booking diaries were linked to Microsoft systems, and many teams returned to paper records while the problems continued.
The knock-on effects reached emergency care too. Referrals of patient details from 999 and 111 calls were stopped by the outage, creating a backlog, and ambulance services were also affected. Patients waiting for prescriptions were warned to expect delays.
Police forces felt the impact as well. Officers urged the public to report crime by calling 101, or 999 in an emergency, rather than using online forms. The Metropolitan Police in London said it was not receiving reports through its website, and other forces reported similar difficulties with digital reports.
Schools and universities were also caught up in the disruption, with many unable to access email for much of the day. Microsoft said the problem was a technical issue caused by higher-than-usual stress on its servers, and stressed it was not a cyber attack. The company said its systems were showing early signs of stabilisation as engineers worked on a fix, and services were fully restored by the following day.
The episode has renewed debate about how heavily hospitals, schools and emergency services depend on a small number of large technology providers. Analysts noted that when one widely used system goes down, the effects can spread quickly across services the public relies on every day.
Source: The Week | Thames Compass
