Microsoft services outage: UK hospitals and courts operating in emergency mode

Issues with the functioning of Microsoft cloud services, particularly the Outlook email system, have persisted for over 24 hours. This incident is of a global nature and significantly complicates the operations of government agencies, medical facilities, and commercial entities in various regions of the world.

Scale of the technical failure

According to monitoring platform Downdetector, as of the evening of 12 November, 140,000 users from 74 countries reported failures in Microsoft services. However, this figure may not reflect the true scale of the outage.

Problems affected institutions in the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Canada, and South Africa.

Impact on healthcare and justice

In the United Kingdom, the situation has significantly impacted the healthcare sector. Because hospital schedules were integrated with Microsoft services, medical facilities had to reschedule some planned procedures. Emergency operations continue to be performed, but some facilities were forced to revert to paper-based medical records and cancel online consultations.

Similar consequences were felt by the judicial systems. Court hearings are being postponed in Scotland and the US. Civil servants are facing problems sending and receiving emails, and the outages have also affected the process of finalising real estate deals.

Business losses and public reaction

The technical failure has also caused damage to the private sector. South African winemaker Peter Pentz said that due to problems with Microsoft infrastructure, a significant part of his business has effectively come to a halt. Communication with European exporters was disrupted, and order processing and the production process stopped.

Meanwhile, other organisations in Africa were less affected, as they managed to quickly switch to communication via messengers.

The public reaction has been mixed. Indian IT specialists joke that the massive outage has given them an "extra day off". A similar reaction was shown by visitors to London pubs. According to them, as reported by the BBC, they came to drink earlier specifically because of the Microsoft infrastructure problems. They noted that they were planning to relax on Friday anyway, but this time decided to start at noon.

Company stance and financial consequences

Microsoft apologised for the widespread disruptions, explaining that the cause was a problem that arose during a network bandwidth update.

Despite the global nature of the outage, it had almost no impact on Microsoft's stock market performance: the company's shares fell by only 0.2%.