Microsoft has confirmed that its services are back up and running following a major worldwide outage that disrupted public services, businesses and organisations across the UK and beyond. The company announced on Saturday morning, November 14, that it had resolved the problems affecting its remaining customers, ending one of the biggest IT disruptions in recent years. Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 products were all affected.

The problems began at around 6pm GMT on Thursday, November 12, and Microsoft spent much of Friday, November 13, working to restore its systems. Downdetector recorded a sharp rise in complaints from users unable to access Microsoft Teams from around 6.15pm in the UK, and more than 130,000 people in the US reported problems with Outlook at the height of the disruption. Police, the NHS, schools and courts were among those affected, and governments in the UK and elsewhere introduced contingency arrangements while services were down.S1S2

Microsoft said the incident was a technical issue and not a cyberattack or the work of AI agents. Government cyber minister Baroness Lloyd of Effra said the disruption had largely affected back-office operations, while acknowledging there had been limited reports of impact on frontline service delivery, which she described as inconvenient and disruptive. She said she had spoken with Microsoft's UK chief executive, Darren Hardman. Police Scotland warned that its email system and online contact forms had been affected and that it was unable to receive emails, with possible delays in responding to forms sent in the previous 24 hours.S2S1

In its latest update on the Microsoft 365 status page, the company said it had completed its efforts to address the underlying issue and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions, with further details available under incident MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center.S2