Microsoft Outage Hits UK Police, NHS and Schools for 12+ Hours
A Microsoft 365 outage disrupted UK police forces, NHS services and schools for more than 12 hours on Thursday and Friday. Microsoft said it saw early signs of stabilisation but capacity had not returned to normal, and it found no sign of a cyber-attack.
A Microsoft outage disrupted UK police forces, NHS services and schools worldwide for more than 12 hours across Thursday and Friday, November 12 and 13, 2026, according to the company and UK authorities. Microsoft said on Friday it was seeing "early signs of stabilisation".
Recovery is not complete. In an update shortly after 9am GMT, Microsoft said service capacity "has not yet returned to normal levels and health remains variable as traffic is carefully reintroduced."
What was affected
The Down Detector outage-tracking site showed a rise in Microsoft 365 problems at about 6pm GMT on Thursday. It logged nearly 130,000 reports in 74 countries. Users could not reliably reach Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, or business services such as SharePoint and OneDrive. Copilot, Microsoft's AI chatbot, was also hit.
The problems were patchy. Some users reported failures with Teams and Outlook email while others did not. More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, according to Microsoft.
Health, police and schools
The NHS in England has a major five-year deal to use Microsoft 365. It said a range of services, including remote therapy sessions, had been disrupted.
With NHS email disrupted, pharmacies reported trouble contacting some GP surgeries about prescriptions. That led to "significant" waiting times for medicines. Several UK police forces urged people not to report crimes online and to phone them instead.
The UK government said it was "working closely" with Microsoft to assess any impact on government services. It added that "robust contingency plans" were in place to minimise disruption.
Cause and fix
Microsoft said there were no indications that a cyber-attack caused the outage. It has suggested the fault may stem from settings applied to servers that keep Microsoft 365 running.
The company said a number of servers were "unexpectedly unavailable" because they failed automated checks. Part of its infrastructure was "experiencing elevated load", which was likely adding to connectivity errors. Microsoft warned that restarted services could become unresponsive again once traffic returned.
To protect delayed messages, it extended the email timeout window to 48 hours.
Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's executive vice-president of Copilot, posted on X that the company would share more information when it became available. "We regret that today's outages caused disruptions for our customers," he said.
The outage also hit connectors used by OpenAI's and Anthropic's AI services. OpenAI said it was investigating broken new connections to Microsoft connectors. Anthropic said an upstream provider issue was affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.
Microsoft said it will publish a post-incident report with the root cause and repair items once the problem is mitigated.
