Microsoft's global 365 outage was still unresolved on Friday morning, leaving UK schools, health services and government offices without some of their everyday software.
Users began reporting problems with Outlook, Teams and Copilot around 5:30 p.m. GMT on November 12, according to Downdetector, a site that tracks user-submitted outage reports. The timing meant most UK offices had just emptied, so the full effect only showed when people logged on Friday. At the time of reporting, major Microsoft services were still unavailable and the company was investigating the cause. Microsoft said it was "seeing early stabilisation", which is its own description, not an all-clear.
The list of affected UK bodies is long: schools, universities, NHS emergency services, pharmacies, GPs, care services, transport, charities, businesses, museums and government offices. The Metropolitan Police website warned that "some online form submissions may be affected." According to Bloomberg, surgical procedures had to be rescheduled.
That last detail is the one that matters. Email and chat outages are usually framed as lost productivity. Here, the same office suite sits underneath scheduling and communication in hospitals and public bodies, so a software failure becomes a cancelled operation. The scale also shows how much of the country runs on one vendor's cloud.
The nearest recent comparison is the July 2024 CrowdStrike failure, which also disrupted hospitals. That one came from a faulty security update crashing Windows machines, not from a cloud service going dark. Microsoft has not said what caused this outage, so it is not yet clear how the two compare. The open question is whether one fault or several took out Outlook, Teams and Copilot together, and Microsoft's explanation should settle it.