Microsoft outage live updates: Outlook, Teams, Copilot hit across the world as boss says it does not appear to be a cyber attack

The Microsoft outage has led to questions over the world’s reliance on its tech – as explained in this video by the Daily Mail’s WILIAM HUNTER.

• Microsoft global outage saw millions of people lose email access
• Issue took 20 hours to resolve after starting at 4.17pm yesterday
• Police couldn’t collect crime reports online and told people to call
• National Pharmacy Association warned of delays to prescriptions
• Microsoft says outages don’t appear to be result of cyber attack
• UK ‘working closely’ with Microsoft and has ‘contingency plans’
• Users from 74 countries reported issues with Microsoft services
• Courts, charities and banks around the world all confirm outages
• Email timeout window extended to 48 hours because of incident
• AI services are also being impacted including Anthropic’s Claude

Pharmacies in the UK have been forced to return to systems used two decades ago due to today’s outage, while they are blocked from accessing patient information.

Olivier Picard, chair of the National Pharmacy Association, described today as ‘horrendous since this morning’.

‘We use NHS mail, which is provided to pharmacies to have a secure link in order to access various platforms, but also communicate with GP surgeries,’ he told Sky News.

‘In my case, we work closely with a hospital that sends us encrypted email with patient information. We are unable to receive those at the moment. We are having to literally go back to what we used to do 20 years ago.

‘We put someone in a car, drive to the hospital to collect the pieces of paper and bring them back to the pharmacy. This is what this outage has caused.’

Global problems with Microsoft’s email and messaging systems caused disruption to some frontline public services, the Government’s cyber minister said.

Baroness Lloyd of Effra said the outage mainly affected back-office functions and contingency measures had been put in place.

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

Microsoft has said it is ‘deeply sorry’ for the major worldwide outage that has disrupted its services in at least 74 countries today.

In a statement, the company 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.’

Although most Microsoft services are back online, the outage today will not have reassured customers – especially given it is the third in 13 months.

Microsoft 365 saw a previous large-scale outage in January, and another one in October 2025.

Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform also reported an outage last month, which impacted its productivity software suite.

And in 2023, a smaller scale outage was blamed on a ‘networking configuration issue’.

As a reminder, the firm has said in the last couple of hours it believes today’s problems were caused by an ‘underlying bug’.

If you are reading this, congratulations – you have survived the end of the world.

That is if a 1960 study predicting today to be ‘doomsday’ is to be believed – although with the Microsoft outage hitting offices, your day may still be a scene of panicked chaos as operations grind to a disastrous halt.

Conspiracy-minded commenters on social media have found a striking connection between the global disruption and a theory claiming ‘doomsday’ will occur on November 13, 2026.

One user cheekily suggested: ‘Is it a mere coincidence? I don’t think so.. it was all planned.’

Written by Heinz von Foerster, an Austrian-American cybernetics expert, and two of his students, the study examined the last 2,000 years of human population growth and predicted it would ‘approach infinity’ and annihilate itself.

Here is the latest update from Microsoft which has just been issued on its service status page.

It says: ‘We remain focused on addressing residual impact and ensuring reliable service restoration.

‘We continue to assess recovery across various connection methods and are closely monitoring service health to verify sustained stability.

‘At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident.

‘We will continue to treat this with urgency until full mitigation, and we will share a full post-incident report with root cause and defense-in-depth actions after mitigation is complete.’

Microsoft says it regrets the impact that outages have had on customers who ‘depend’ on its services, as it continues to report improvements.

‘We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure,’ it said in a statement.

‘We know our customers rely on our services to get important work done every day, and regret the impact these outages had on those who depend on us.’

Microsoft also continued its assertion that there are no signs of the outage being linked to ‘malicious or cyber activity’.

The nine-to-five crowd may have reacted to Microsoft’s global meltdown with a deluge of memes, but the UK’s so-called ‘preppers’ have insisted the widespread outage is no laughing matter.

Professional middle-class Britons ‘bracing for doomsday’ took to Facebook to declare ‘and so it begins’ after the outage knocked out various platforms including Outlook.

Read the full story from the Daily Mail’s Maanya Sachdeva and Jessica Green here.

One estate agent has described how his staff used ‘good old-fashioned common sense’ and direct phone conversations to work around disruption caused by Microsoft’s global outage.

Neil Louth, group executive director of Acorn Group, said: ‘We acted early this morning, co-ordinating teams across sales, lettings, land, commercial, financial services, shared ownership, surveying, planning and auctions.

‘Our priority was to minimise the impact on clients, keep everyone informed and ensure transactions and business opportunities continued to progress across every part of the business.

‘Teams contacted clients with appointments by phone and used alternative communication channels to bring the relevant parties together and make sure everyone understood what needed to happen next.

‘Good old-fashioned common sense, initiative and direct conversations have helped our teams work around the disruption.’

He added: ‘Keeping customers informed and ensuring their transactions continue to progress remains our main priority.’

The disruption happened on ‘unlucky’ Friday 13 – a date which analysis by Rightmove suggests is often shunned as a day to move home.

Microsoft’s executive leadership team insisted today’s outage was caused by a ‘technical issue’ and is not related to a cyber attack or AI agents.

It said in a message to customers: ‘Several months ago, we upgraded our network gateways to add capacity and that upgrade introduced a bug.

‘That bug did not cause any known problems over the past several months. Yesterday, there was a network change that triggered failures and increased load on the otherwise healthy system causing a cascading failure.

‘Now, the underlying bug has been addressed and, due to a large volume of queued work, we are gradually bringing customers and regions back online.

‘We continue to monitor system recovery and are taking additional steps to accelerate service restoration where possible.’