The Microsoft outage that disrupted essential services across Britain is expected to cause problems for days, after a software bug affected millions of users worldwide and exposed the country’s dependence on a small number of US technology providers.
Microsoft said it was “very sorry” for the disruption, which affected up to 430 million users in 74 countries. The company warned that intermittent problems could continue for a further 48 hours as engineers worked to restore services.
The disruption affected Outlook email and applications including Word, Excel and Teams. Microsoft executive vice-president Charles Lamanna ruled out a cyber-attack and said services were being restored gradually.
In Britain, pharmacies, NHS services, police forces, courts, schools, charities, banks and businesses were among those dealing with the consequences.
At least 47 NHS trusts reported problems, alongside 25 of the country’s 44 police force areas and at least 116 primary and secondary schools. NHS England said staff were using “long-standing measures”, including paper records.
The National Pharmacy Association warned of delays to some NHS prescriptions. Dr Tim Frank, a GP in Penzance, Cornwall, said Microsoft products were central to primary care and that the outage had been “very disruptive”, preventing some referrals to district nurses and hospital outpatient services.
Rachel Harrison, national secretary of the GMB union, said the outage had a “serious impact” on ambulance services. Staff working on the 111 and 999 services were unable to refer patients in the usual way, she said, creating “a massive backlog”. Emergency and life-threatening callouts were not affected.
Police forces said they had been unable to collect some crime reports online and told people to use 999 or 101 instead. Some organisations resorted to fax machines, while businesses struggled with email communications on payday.
Courts were also affected, with some juries sent home and prisoners unable to arrive for hearings. At Manchester Crown Court, Judge Maurice Greene told a jury: “What we are learning is the dangers of our reliability on computer systems.”
The disruption also affected property transactions, as chains of house sales relied on emails between estate agents, banks and solicitors. Jeremy Leaf, an estate agent in north London, said customers were being advised “to try to use telephones or even communicate by hand”.
National Rail said some customers had been unable to access email tickets, while councils reported disruption to services.
Professor Junaid Arshad, head of computer science at Birmingham City University, said the incident was a stark reminder of the “profound risks” created by the concentration of digital infrastructure. The bug’s “cascading real-world impact on government and public services is immense”, he said.
Dame Chi Onwurah, chairwoman of the Commons science and technology committee, condemned what she called the “lack of resilience in the UK’s digital infrastructure”. She said the incident had shown that Britain was “hugely dependent on a small number of US-based technology providers for our public services”.
Baroness Lloyd of Effra, the cyber minister, said there had been “limited reports of impact on frontline service delivery”. She said she had spoken to Microsoft UK chief executive Darren Hardman and that the Government would review the incident and lessons learned.
Microsoft said an extended 48-hour email timeout window had been introduced to allow delayed messages to arrive. It promised to publish a full post-incident report after recovery was complete.
The effects were reported internationally, with Australia’s intelligence services affected, Singapore’s tax authority taken offline and Japan’s government IT system hit. A jail in Colorado said it had been unable to release prisoners.
City firm Morningstar estimated that the global disruption could cost insurers up to 500 million dollars.
Scammers moved quickly to exploit the outage, calling potential victims and asking for passwords to “restore Microsoft services”. Royal Mail used the disruption for a marketing message, posting a photograph of a red postbox with the words: “No inbox, no problem. Ours is always open.”
