Union members keep Britain running as massive Microsoft outage disrupts police, NHS and schools

POLICE forces, the NHS and schools were among the millions affected by one of the worst IT failures in years today. A major outage saw Microsoft email, Teams and other services go down at around 6pm o

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A major outage saw Microsoft email, Teams and other services go down at around 6pm on Thursday.

The tech giant said that its services were still being “gradually restored” on Friday night with the government and its counterparts worldwide having been forced to put contingency measures in place.

Responding to the massive disruption to public services, Unison general secretary Andrea Egan said: “Unison members, from paramedics to school support and police staff, are keeping public services running in spite of this outage.

“We are in close contact with our members, especially across the NHS, to understand the full extent of the impact.

“One corporation’s failure should not be able to cut communications across our hospitals and emergency services.

“Our public services desperately need investment to make their infrastructure more resilient.”

Monitoring website Downdetector first showed a spike in users reporting problems with Microsoft Teams in Britain at about 6.15pm on Thursday.

Police forces said that they were unable to receive crime reports online and are urging people to call either 101 or 999 to make any urgent reports.

NHS England said that health service staff are “enacting long-standing measures” to overcome IT outages.

Chair of the science and technology committee Dame Chi Onwurah said: “The global Microsoft outage only serves to highlight once again the lack of resilience in Britain’s digital infrastructure and the dangers that this dependency can pose to our security, economy and public services.

“My committee’s report on delivering a digital government concluded that Britain is hugely dependent on a small number of US-based technology providers for our public services, preventing homegrown alternatives from developing.

“In its response, the government could not tell us how much it was spending on IT and digital — or who it was spending it with. Without even knowing this, how can we protect against vendor lock-in or achieve the resilience and digital sovereignty Britain needs?”

Downing Street said that ministers are being briefed on Microsoft outages and contingency plans are in place for disrupted services as the government seeks to figure out the “full picture” of the impact.

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