Microsoft Outage Disrupted NHS, Courts and Police Across the UK

More than 1 million NHS staff lost access to their core IT system on Friday as a global Microsoft outage disrupted hospitals, GP surgeries, courts, police forces and property transactions across the UK.

Senior health sources described the disruption to the NHS as "serious" and "widespread," with hundreds of hospitals, GP surgeries and community health services affected. Staff first noticed problems accessing email in the early hours of Friday morning, but most grasped the severity from around 6am.

The outage struck NHS.net Connect, the Microsoft-powered platform used by more than 1 million NHS staff for emails, meetings, calendars and file access. NHS sources said the disruption hit a range of Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive and Copilot. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) also reported problems sending and receiving emails.

The immediate consequence: many staff could not log in, perform basic duties, or send and receive patient data. Some resorted to paper records.

How bad was the damage to healthcare?

An NHS England spokesperson said: "Local NHS services are enacting longstanding measures to manage IT outages and ensure critical services and appointments can continue for patients today."

Patients were urged to attend appointments unless advised otherwise, and to keep using 999 in emergencies. Inevitably, some operations and appointments were cancelled. Some staff said they could not send urgent messages about referrals for cancer and other serious conditions. Community services staff raised concerns that patients who normally contact them by email — sometimes with urgent needs — were unable to do so.

The fallback channels created their own problems. Some local NHS organisations asked patients on social media to phone instead; GP surgery staff told the Guardian they were inundated with calls checking whether appointments would go ahead.

By Friday afternoon, some NHS doctors reported email service returning. The full extent of the disruption will probably not be clear for days — a caveat worth holding against any early claims of a swift recovery.

What happened in the courts?

Cases at magistrates, crown and civil courts were cancelled or delayed because the Courts and Tribunals Judiciary relies on Microsoft platforms, including Outlook, for email.

At Minshull Street crown court in Manchester, Judge Maurice Greene sent jurors home for the weekend after a case — in which nine men are on trial accused of raping a woman drugged by her husband — was abandoned for the day. Greene told the jury that staff had been hunting for a fax machine as an alternative to email. "Many institutions rely on Microsoft 365, as do the court and various institutions connected to the court, so there have all been sort of delays because of this," he said.

The disruption reached the supreme court, the UK's highest court. "The Court is currently not receiving emails, but the Portal and contact forms are still functioning as normal," it said in a post on X.

Family and civil court judgments scheduled for Friday were delayed until Monday because they are normally sent remotely by email. The Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service said all civil and criminal courts were running, but "some hearings are subject to delays." A Downing Street spokesperson said people should "continue to attend courts and tribunal systems where they are able to."

Were emergency services at risk?

Police said 999 emergency calls were unaffected. The main casualty was the online service for reporting crimes or concerns, along with back-office functions such as communications departments, HR and internal email.

One senior source in a southern English force put the event in perspective: "It was more of an inconvenience rather than an operational challenge."

A Durham constabulary spokesperson said: "Frontline services and our ability to respond to incidents remain unaffected. Although our online crime reporting service has been down for several hours, our 999 and 101 lines have remained in constant operation for the public. Our primary issue has been around the loss of email, which means we anticipate a potential backlog of non-urgent demand once the outage is fully resolved."

The Metropolitan police, Britain's biggest force, said officers and staff had been unable to access Outlook but were "now starting to see this service resume," with business continuity plans in place. One force found roughly 80 emails waiting when Microsoft came back — none of them urgent. Officers who had been due in court may now need time off regular duties for rescheduled hearings.

Did the housing market seize up?

The property industry said "old-fashioned common sense" saved the day as parties spoke directly and made hand deliveries to push sales through. Friday is a popular moving day because buyers use the weekend to settle in.

Ian Harris, president of NAEA Propertymark, the estate agents' professional body, noted that many agents, lenders and conveyancers use purpose-built portals unaffected by the outage. David Strank, who runs Kent-based Stranks Removals & Storage, said two customers' moves were disrupted but eventually went ahead after a nervous wait. He suggested the email-based exchange of contracts was more exposed than completions and physical moves.

Jeremy Leaf, principal of Jeremy Leaf + Co in north London, said: "As a contingency, we're advising customers to try to use telephones or even communicate by hand where possible."

The pattern across sectors is consistent: frontline services held, but the episode exposed how much routine administration — patient referrals, court judgments, contract exchanges — now depends on a single vendor's cloud. The NHS says the full impact will take days to assess, and that reckoning, not Friday's quick fixes, will show the true cost.