Microsoft apologises as Scottish government activates resilience operations amid outage

Microsoft has said it is “deeply sorry” for disruption caused by a major global outage that affected police forces, the NHS, businesses and schools in one of the worst IT failures for years.

The technology giant said late on Friday it was “seeing broad recovery” across its services and that the outage was caused by a “technical issue not related to cyber or AI agents”.

Technology experts said the scale of the disruption demonstrated the danger of over-reliance on one company’s digital infrastructure.

The Scottish government activated its resilience operations as Justice Secretary Neil Gray said ministers were liaising with key partners.

Scottish councils and other public services were hit with technology problems that left millions without access to emails and Teams around the world.

Mr Gray said: “The Scottish Government’s resilience operation has been activated to assess the main impacts on Scotland of the global outage impacting some of Microsoft’s Cloud Services.”

He added: “While this is currently impacting some of the Scottish Government’s corporate systems, including access to emails, the Scottish Government remains operational and business continues.”

Police Scotland reported problems with its emails and online forms – but stressed people could still call them if needed.

A spokesperson for the force said: “Due to the global Microsoft outage our online forms are affected which includes the Contact Us form.

“We are unable to receive any emails and there may be a delay in responding to any forms sent to us in the last 24 hours as this outage continues.”

The spokesperson added: “We will advise when this has been resolved. In a non-emergency, please call 101 and in the event of an emergency, please call 999.”

An NHS Grampian spokesperson said: “NHS Grampian is affected by the Outlook outage this morning which means that staff and services are currently unable to access e-mails.

“Telephone lines and all other systems are working as normal.”

The courts service was also impacted by the outage, saying urgent inquiries relating to cases on Friday and on Monday need to be done by telephone.

In a statement the service said: “Due to the worldwide Microsoft outage, generic email inboxes within the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service are not operational.

“For any urgent enquiries, including matters relating to hearings today or Monday, please contact the local court or tribunal by telephone.

“Email enquiries will be responded to when the service returns.”

Many of Scotland’s local authorities experienced the same problems, and a spokesperson for the City of Edinburgh Council wrote: “Due to a worldwide Microsoft outage, we are unable to send or receive emails at this time, and some of our online forms are not available.

“If you need to get in touch with us, please contact us by telephone.”

The UK government and counterparts worldwide were also forced to put in place contingency measures.

Government cyber minister Baroness Lloyd of Effra said the outage mainly affected back-office functions.

But she acknowledged there had been “limited reports of impact on frontline service delivery” and the incident had been “inconvenient and disruptive”.

The minister said she had spoken to Microsoft UK’s chief executive, Darren Hardman, about the situation.

In a statement posted on X on Friday afternoon, Microsoft said: “We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners. We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously.

“We are seeing broad recovery and stability across our services.

“This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents. The incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change.

“We have addressed the underlying issue and continue to restore service to remaining customers and regions.

“Given the scale of demand, we restored services gradually, validating stability at each stage. While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration.

“We will provide a full post-incident report once our review is complete.”

Monitoring website Downdetector first showed a spike in users reporting problems with the Microsoft Teams messaging service in the UK at about 6:15pm on Thursday, with more than 130,000 reporting issues with the Outlook email program in the US at its peak on Thursday night.

Millions of its customers were unable to send and receive emails through Outlook, with Teams also affected for many users, and the tech giant’s Copilot AI assistant and other Microsoft 365 services also disrupted.

Other AI chat services were disrupted, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.

Steven Watt, professor of practice in cybersecurity at the University of St Andrews, said the outage was “a stark reminder of how much of modern working life depends on a handful of digital platforms”.

Prof Watt said: “This is a question of resilience rather than technology preference.

Organisations should be able to answer some basic questions. Which of our critical processes depend on a single supplier? How long could we operate if that supplier were unavailable? What is our fallback for communicating with staff, customers and regulators? Have we tested it, or do we simply assume it exists?

“A continuity plan that relies on the same platform that has just failed is not a plan.”

Jeremy Singer, Professor of Computer Systems and Programming Languages at the University of Glasgow's School of Computing Science, said: “With no emails coming or going, many office workers feel like they are having a virtual snow day.

“This problem serves to emphasize the dependence we have built on one company's digital infrastructure, and may lead us to question whether we need more resilience in our IT ecosystem.”