A widespread Microsoft outage that began on Thursday has left schools, councils, health trusts and universities across Northern Ireland unable to access email and other critical services. According to BBC News, the disruption has affected organisations in more than 70 countries globally, with monitoring website Downdetector recording around 140,000 reports of Outlook problems on Thursday evening alone.
Microsoft said on Friday that it was seeing "early signs of stabilisation", though services had not yet returned to normal. The company confirmed the outage was not caused by a cyber-security breach. Reuters reported that Microsoft's investigation found a process establishing secure connections on affected servers became overwhelmed, causing them to stop processing requests.
The Education Authority announced on Friday that Outlook was unavailable to Northern Ireland schools and its own staff, stating: "Emails cannot currently be sent or received." This follows earlier disruption affecting UK GPs, police forces and pharmacies from the same global outage.
Which services are affected in Northern Ireland?
Multiple public bodies and organisations have reported disruption. The South Eastern Health Trust said there would be "no impact on clinical services", while Northern Ireland Ambulance Service confirmed that patient services are not impacted by the outage.
Several councils have experienced email system failures. Lisburn and Castlereagh City Council acknowledged the "ongoing global disruption" and said it would provide further updates if necessary. Causeway Coast and Glens Borough Council confirmed it had been impacted, noting that the majority of council services remain unaffected but staff are unable to send and receive emails.
Queen's University Belfast reported that students and staff are currently unable to receive or send emails and may experience difficulties accessing certain systems. The university advised that staff and students should not use personal email accounts to send, receive or store university-related communications or information.
What services has Microsoft 365 affected?
Microsoft 365 Services, including Teams, Outlook and the company's artificial intelligence software Copilot, have experienced "connectivity problems". According to Reuters, features relying on Exchange Online and email were affected, while Microsoft 365 features not dependent on Exchange Online remained functional.
Customers have reported varying levels of access disruption. Many have been unable to send or receive emails, view certain files or access details on their calendar applications. Some users have retained the ability to use Teams and have continued to access messaging and online meeting functions without significant issues.
More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps according to Microsoft's website. The full scale of the outage has not been confirmed, though the real figure affected is likely much higher than Downdetector's 140,000 reports, as the monitoring website relies primarily on users self-reporting problems. Microsoft 365 is used by companies worldwide and the disruption is expected to have knock-on effects for other services dependent on these tools.
How is Microsoft responding?
According to AFP, Microsoft paused deployments, shifted traffic away from affected infrastructure and restarted servers as it worked to restore service. The company said its server adjustments had not produced sustained recovery, though it saw partial recovery in some regions and was reviewing further steps to improve infrastructure stability.
Microsoft said it was validating a configuration change on a subset of servers before applying it more broadly, alongside continuing server restarts. This approach represents a cautious strategy to prevent further disruption while gradually restoring normal operations.
What is the broader context?
This outage follows a previous Azure cloud outage the previous month that also disrupted Microsoft's productivity tools and affected businesses globally, highlighting ongoing reliability concerns with the company's infrastructure.
