A global Microsoft outage that knocked out Outlook, Teams, and Copilot has paralysed the UK government and courts system, forcing officials to scramble for contingency plans.

Following the outage, questions linger about the judgments due to be handed down Friday morning. Civil court judgments are usually handed down remotely via email before appearing on the Bailii and the Judiciary website. However, most government departments, including the Courts and Tribunals Judiciary, use Microsoft platforms, including Outlook, for email.

understands that a plan is being put in place to ensure journalists and parties can access the legal decisions, but the outage might delay some judgments until Monday.

The outage has lasted nearly 17 hours across Britain and Europe, affecting governments and businesses, as Microsoft said its attempts to fix the problem produced only partial results and warned services could become unresponsive again even after being restored.

“We’re continuing to work on recovering our frontend servers while implementing further traffic optimisation actions to improve service stability and increase capacity,” the tech giant said in a statement. “We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact”.

Microsoft attributed the disruption to servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable, which placed additional strain on its remaining infrastructure, and ruled out a cyber attack.

Government departments without emails

An HMRC spokesperson told that its emails are down, but its “phone lines are working as expected”, as the tax authority “encourages people to use our online services if they need support.” They added, “We will continue to assess any impacts on our customers.”

It is also understood that the staff in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) are blocked from their emails.

Meanwhile, several police forces, including the Metropolitan Police, Dorset Police, South Wales Police and Thames Valley Police, have reported disruption. The Met warned that online crime reports may not reach officers, advising the public to call 101 for urgent non-emergency matters or 999 in an emergency.

NHS services have also been affected, with reports of problems accessing Rapid Health, an online consultation platform used by GP practices.

Rachel Harrison, national secretary at the GMB union, told Sky News the outage was having a “serious impact” across ambulance and NHS trusts. “Those who work in 111 services are unable to refer patient details, which is creating a massive backlog and has the potential for chaos,” she said.

Defence minister Luke Pollard confirmed that government engineers were working with Microsoft to assess the disruption.

“We’ve already been in touch with Microsoft and the dialogue between our cyber resilience teams across government and Microsoft continues,” he told Times Radio. “I want to see this fixed; it is on Microsoft to do so.”

understands the Cabinet Office is not affected as it uses Google. A government spokesperson said “robust contingency plans” were in place to minimise disruption.

Outage exposes reliance on US tech

The disruption has also affected businesses worldwide, with Swiss luxury goods group Richemont reportedly delaying the publication of its half-year results on Friday morning.

“We have spent a significant amount of time focusing on the efficiencies that automation, AI and digital systems bring. Perhaps not enough about what happens when they stop working”, said Elisa Sofocli, a partner at leading audit, tax and business advisory firm Blick Rothenberg.

“As businesses are becoming better at using technology are they also less capable of operating without it.”

AI giants OpenAI and Anthropic have also reported problems with services connected to Microsoft’s infrastructure.

Toby Murray, a computing professor at the University of Melbourne, warned of the “inherent dangers” of businesses relying on a handful of technology giants for critical infrastructure. He said an outage at one provider could “dramatically reduce business productivity globally”.

The incident comes just days after the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre urged businesses to strengthen their resilience against technology failures and supply chain disruption.

Microsoft said it was continuing to work on restoring services but has yet to provide a timetable for a full recovery.