UK Government reveals urgent 'contingency plans' as Microsoft global outage hits police and NHS systems

The UK Government has revealed urgent 'contingency plans' as vital services across the UK and the world were hit by a major Microsoft outage.

The tech giant continued to experience disruption on Friday (13 November) as it tried to resolve huge outages impacting some of its most popular services worldwide.

Affected products included instant messaging service Teams, AI service Copilot, Outlook emails and some aspects of its Cloud services, among others, with hundreds of thousands of reports made online.

In the latest update, Microsoft reported it was making progress in its battle to get its services back online.

Issuing a current status message online, the tech giant said: "Recovery efforts are ongoing across impacted infrastructure.

"We are seeing early signs of stabilisation, but service capacity has not yet returned to normal levels and health remains variable as traffic is carefully reintroduced.

"Our primary mitigation path continues to focus on service stability and controlled recovery. We are also evaluating additional mitigation options to improve recovery speed and consistency.

"Network and traffic-management actions remain in progress, and we continue to prioritise backlog and queue health to preserve delayed mail during recovery."

The outage appears to have been caused by a technical failure within the server infrastructure although a definitive root cause has not been published yet.

However the outage hit major services including to the police and NHS, with the Government now revealing urgent contingency plans.

Numerous police forces have issued warnings about crime reporting tools, as the UK health service also said it was struggling accessing systems.

Luke Pollard, the UK's Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry said on Friday that government engineers were working with Microsoft to address the problems.

A Government spokesperson meanwhile said: "We are aware of the ongoing global technical issues affecting Microsoft services.

“We are working closely with Microsoft to assess any impact on government services, with robust contingency plans in place to minimise disruption.”

Posts on X were shared by a number of police forces on Friday regarding reporting issues. One of those was Dorset Police, which urged people to call for crime reporting.

A statement said: "Due to a global Microsoft service issue, we are currently unable to receive online form submissions. Until this is resolved, if your report is time-critical but not an emergency, please dial 101.

"If your report can wait until Microsoft restores its service, please submit an online form once you are able to do so. If a crime is in progress or a life is in danger, call 999."

On social media, South Wales police also issued similar advice due to the outage, penning: “We’re aware of global issues affecting Microsoft Outlook this evening, which have impacted our ability to receive online reports via the website as well as our general contact centre email address.

“Until these issues are resolved, if you need to make a non-urgent report, please call us on 101 or send a direct message to this Facebook account. In an emergency, always dial 999.”

Meanwhile various NHS departments issued statements on how they'd been affected. This included the Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust (CNWL) which said: "Patients: please call your usual CNWL service rather than emailing until further notice. Emails may not be received. We apologise for any inconvenience."

And NHS Grampian, an NHS board in Scotland said some GP practises were affected, saying: "We are experiencing issues due to the Outlook outage, affecting some GP practices’ access to Hosted Vision systems. Telephone lines and other systems are operational. We apologise for any inconvenience and hope Microsoft resolves the issue soon."

More to follow.