Microsoft outage tests UK reliance on a single technology supplier

Daniel Okafor

The UK government said it spent roughly £1.9bn on Microsoft software licences in 2025. The same disclosure came as a global outage disrupted email, calendars and other Microsoft 365 services.

No publicly available figures show how much critical UK infrastructure runs on those platforms. That gap now sits at the centre of the debate over vendor concentration in public services.

What broke across the NHS?

The main NHS problem was confirming appointment times. Staff arriving on Friday could not access email, which affected care in hospitals and GP surgeries. Some reached Microsoft Teams on their phones, but meetings were cancelled across the board.

Pharmacists warned of possible delays to prescriptions. A union reported that ambulance services had suffered a "serious impact."

"Local NHS services are enacting longstanding measures to manage IT outages and ensure critical services and appointments can continue for patients today – including using other IT systems or paper records where possible."

— NHS England spokesperson

Why did courts look for fax machines?

The already backlogged court system faltered. Jurors went home early in some cases, and some prisoners were not sent to court. At Minshull Street crown court in Manchester, Judge Maurice Greene said staff had been looking for a fax machine that morning.

Greene told jurors: "What we are learning is the dangers of our reliability on computer systems and platforms, and so on." Many institutions, including his court, rely on Microsoft 365, which caused delays, he said.

"It may be Mr Gates’s fault but I don’t think he is going to come and apologise."

— Judge Maurice Greene, Minshull Street crown court

Greene noted that the Microsoft co-founder resigned from the company’s board six years ago.

How far did the disruption spread?

• Schools, colleges and universities were affected. Ofsted could not receive email, disrupting school inspections in England.
• Universities rely on Outlook, OneDrive and other Microsoft services for administration and communications. Teams appeared to work for some online meetings.
• National Rail warned that emailed tickets might not load, and advised customers to use websites or apps instead. Cheltenham racecourse urged visitors to arrive early.
• Airports ran services as normal, and travel disruption was limited.
• The Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority were hit by the Outlook outage. A bank spokesperson said "all critical operations" were running normally.

The disruption landed on the busiest day of the week for mortgage completions. Businesses braced for economic damage.

Why did one supplier become a systemic risk?

Tim Clement-Jones, former chair of the House of Lords Artificial Intelligence Select Committee, called the outages an "I-told-you-so moment." He cited a Guardian investigation in September that found senior police officials accepted the risk that a US government insider and foreign actors could compromise sensitive data as key systems moved on to Microsoft.

"It is not a surprise that there is this dependency on a single ‘hyperscaler’, like Microsoft. I’ve got quite a lot of time for Microsoft as a business, but you don’t just put your eggs in one basket, and I’m afraid that’s what the government has been doing for some considerable period of time."

— Tim Clement-Jones

He said the government had "just blindly procured" and added: "They haven’t really seriously thought about the resilience required in our civil service – in our forms of email, communication, data storage, and so on. The easy thing to do is to buy the full suite from Microsoft."

Documents previously obtained by the Guardian indicated police believed hosting data on Microsoft’s platform put vital services at risk during a global outage. That pointed to a need for backup options for first responders.

What did government and regulators say?

Downing Street said it was seeking to establish the "full picture" of Microsoft outages and urged the public to follow advice on "alternative ways to get in touch" where services were disrupted. A spokesperson said the prime minister was being kept updated and that departments could rely on contingency plans.

The same spokesperson declined to say whether Downing Street itself had been affected. "There are contingency measures in place at No 10, as there are with all government departments, to ensure that work can go on as usual," they said. On the NHS, they said it appeared all clinical and operational systems were working effectively.

A minister said government engineers were working with Microsoft to assess the impact. The Welsh government said it was putting contingency plans in place.

Microsoft executive vice-president Charles Lamanna said the outages did not appear to be the result of a cyber-attack. On Friday morning, the company reported "early signs of stabilisation" before updating that email traffic was gradually being restored.

Dame Chi Onwurah, chair of the Commons science and technology committee, said the outage exposed weak resilience in UK digital infrastructure and risks to security, the economy and public services. Her committee’s report earlier this year found Britain hugely dependent on a small number of US-based technology providers, which prevented 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 the UK needs?"

— Dame Chi Onwurah

Luke Pollard, Britain’s minister for defence readiness and industry, said the outage showed the need for "greater resilience" against technology failures. He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

"My appetite for disruption when it comes to using my phone is virtually zero. I imagine that’s the case for every one of your listeners, that people want it to work all the time, every time, and we’re seeing more disruption from those tech companies. That’s partly because we’ve become more dependent on technology."

The Liberal Democrats called the government response a "national resilience failure" and asked a minister to brief MPs in parliament. Lisa Smart, the Lib Dem Cabinet Office spokesperson, said: "No single provider should have such a major impact across the NHS, police and other frontline services."

What changes now?

The next test is whether government can price resilience before another outage forces clinics, courts and police back to paper. Disclosure of total IT spending and supplier concentration would give Parliament a baseline, but neither figure is currently public.