Microsoft says all services fully restored after global outage hit NHS, police and schools

Microsoft has confirmed that all of its services have been fully restored following a global outage that disrupted the NHS, police forces, schools and other organisations across the UK.

The problems began at 6pm UK time on Thursday, when a technical issue started affecting email, messaging and other services. The company worked through the incident and, by Saturday morning, the remaining problems had been resolved for its customers.

In an update posted on its Microsoft 365 status page, the company said: "We have completed our efforts to address the underlying issue of the incident and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions." It added that further updates could be found at MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin centre.

Millions of customers were left unable to send or receive Outlook emails during the disruption, while Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services were also affected. At the peak of the outage on Thursday night, more than 130,000 people in the US reported problems with Outlook on the monitoring website Downdetector.

The fallout was felt across public services in the UK. Some police forces in England and Wales said they were unable to receive crime reports online on Friday, while NHS England said some staff had reverted to using paper records in response to the IT failures.

The government cyber minister, Baroness Lloyd of Effra, said contingency measures had been put in place to deal with the disruption. She confirmed there had been "limited reports of impact on frontline service delivery", describing the effects as "inconvenient and disruptive".

Baroness Lloyd also spoke directly with Microsoft UK's chief executive, Darren Hardman, about the situation as the company worked to bring services back online.

Microsoft said on Friday that the outage had been triggered by a "technical issue not related to cyber or AI agents", ruling out speculation that the mass failure was linked to a security incident.