Microsoft Outage Hits Schools, GPs and Police Across the UK
A Microsoft 365 outage that began Thursday evening has disrupted UK schools, GP surgeries, pharmacies and police forces. Microsoft says it sees early signs of stabilisation, rules out a cyber-attack, and blames overloaded servers after a failure in automated checks.
A global Microsoft outage disrupted schools, GP surgeries, pharmacies and police forces across the UK from Thursday evening into Friday, November 13, 2026. Microsoft said it was seeing "early signs of stabilisation" on Friday morning, after problems that affected millions of users for more than 12 hours.
The Microsoft outage on schools, GPs and businesses is patchy. Some people can use Teams and Outlook normally, while others cannot send or receive email, open files or view calendars.
What Microsoft has said
Microsoft has ruled out a cyber-attack. It blames "elevated load" on part of its infrastructure, meaning servers are handling far more traffic than usual.
The company said a number of servers became "unexpectedly unavailable" because they failed during automated checks. That pushed extra traffic onto the remaining servers and strained them.
In an update shortly after 9am GMT on Friday, Microsoft 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."
Earlier, the company had reported only "marginal success" and said its fixes were not working as expected. It also warned that restarted services could become unresponsive again once traffic returned.
Microsoft is extending its email timeout window to 48 hours to protect delayed messages. It promised a post-incident report covering the root cause once the problem is mitigated.
Who is affected
More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, according to Microsoft. Outage tracker Downdetector logged nearly 130,000 reports across 74 countries on Thursday evening, covering Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive and the Copilot AI assistant. It relies on users reporting problems themselves, so the true number is likely higher.
In the UK, the NHS has said a range of services, including remote therapy sessions, have been disrupted. With NHS email affected, pharmacies report trouble communicating with some GP surgeries about prescriptions, leading to "significant" waits for medicines.
Some surgeries have asked patients not to send messages through their websites. Several police forces have urged people to phone rather than report crimes online. Schools have also been hit.
The Singaporean government and Australia's spy agency said they were affected too. OpenAI said it was investigating broken connections to Microsoft's services. Anthropic said an issue with an upstream provider was affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.
The UK government said it was working closely with Microsoft and that "robust contingency plans" were in place to minimise disruption.
Expert reaction
Australian cyber-security expert Troy Hunt said the outage showed how critical email remains. He said it hurts people's ability to work, and also to arrange appointments, verify purchases and access accounts.
Paul Spain of New Zealand-based advisory firm Gorilla Technology said companies had practically "lost a business day".
Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's executive vice-president of Copilot, said on X: "We regret that today's outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue."
