Microsoft Meltdown: Global Friday 13th outage hits police, doctors and schools as fixes fail

A worldwide Microsoft outage has left businesses, government services like police and doctors, schools, airlines and individuals unable to access services, including Outlook, Teams and Copilot.

The blackout has now dragged on for over 14 hours as the company struggles to fix the issue.

Charles Lamanna, an executive at the fourth-biggest company in the world, said he could confirm the outage is not "the result of malicious or cyber activity".

In a service health notice, Microsoft said services which rely on Exchange Online and email were affected.

Exchange Online is the company's cloud-based messaging platform that delivers email, calendar, contacts, and tasks.

Artificial intelligence giant OpenAI said some tools connected to Microsoft were not working as expected as a result of the outage.

And AI rival Anthropic also said it was suffering problems.

The 2024 CrowdStrike outage cost Fortune 500 businesses an estimated £5.4billion.

More than 5,000 flights worldwide were grounded as a result of the technical disruption, leaving hundreds of British holidaymakers frustrated.

Hundreds of Britons were then left stuck in queues for the ferry crossing at Dover as they sought alternative ways to travel.

Police forces across the UK impacted

Millions of Britons have been left unable to report crimes online. Police forces across the UK rely on Microsoft systems to power its online form, which is used to report non-emergency crimes online. This is to alleviate strain on the phone lines, including 999 and the non-emergency 101 number.

If you attempt to report a crime online via the online form today, you’ll be met with a warning that reads: “Due to a global Microsoft service issue, some online form submissions may be affected. If your report is time-critical but not an emergency, please call 101. In an emergency, call 999.”

Outages around the world

Downdetector, an internet monitoring website, said 74 countries reported problems with Microsoft services in one hour, with direct reports to the website peaking at nearly 140,000 around 6pm on Thursday.

More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 services, while between three and four million businesses rely on it.

This includes governments worldwide.

Services NSW, which provides a range of Government services in Australia's state of New South Wales, urged visitors to delay their in-person visits and complete transactions online where possible.

Singapore's Government confirmed the outage had affected some of its systems but "emergency services remain fully operational".

The US House of Representatives also said its users were experiencing problems and its engineers were now liaising with Microsoft.

If the outage hits 24 hours, it could be the "most severe technology outage in history" and impact billions of dollars in operations, New Zealand-based tech analyst Paul Spain told the BBC.

Microsoft 'do not believe they are dealing with a cyber hack event'

Australia's Home Affairs and Cybersecurity Minister Tony Burke said he had spoken to Microsoft officials who "do not believe they are dealing with a cyber hack event".

He said the outage was similar to the 2024 CrowdStrike incident, when an update-gone-wrong grounded flights, left companies unable to accept payments, and cut a Sky News broadcast.

"One of the things that we had with CrowdStrike was we then had a whole lot of downstream impacts where it was affected the capability of a whole range of other products," he said.

What has Microsoft said?

Microsoft, in an update, said it had noticed a "partial recovery" in some regions, but its actions were failing to result in a "sustained recovery".

The company later added that it is "engaged in multiple workstreams to alleviate impact".

At 3.13am, the US-based company, worth in excess of £2.9 trillion — making it the third most valuable company worldwide, said the changes it had made to "improve serviceability" were not "taking as expected".

A patch rolled out just before 8am also failed to work.