Microsoft outage ‘not cyber-attack’, says software giant's executive after services hit around UK
Frontline public services around the UK were disrupted by worldwide problems with Microsoft’s email and messaging systems, the government has said.
Labour’s cyber minister, 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”.
English police forces had said they were unable to receive crime reports online, while the country’s NHS stated health service staff enacted “long-standing measures” to overcome IT outages such as switching to paper records.
Councils also said some services had been impacted, while National Rail said the outage may have affected customers’ ability to access their train tickets via email.
A senior official at software giant Microsoft said the issue did not appear to stem from a cyber-attack.
The company’s executive vice-president Charles Lamanna said in a statement this afternoon: “We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure.
“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.
“Our teams are reviewing what happened and how we can prevent similar issues going forward.”
Monitoring website Downdetector first showed a spike in users reporting problems with Microsoft Teams in the UK at about 6.15pm on Thursday, with more than 130,000 reporting Outlook issues in the US at its peak.
Millions of its customers were unable to send and receive emails through Outlook, with remote working software Teams affected for many.
Microsoft said a patch was put in place to fix the issue, stressing it had “no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident”.