Australia lost a day of business, the UK’s NHS had to resort to pen and paper and key parts of government in several countries lost communications. Microsoft said it wasn’t a cyberattack, but in the wake of hoax bomb alerts on a number of airlines, hacking of supermarket refrigerators and some banking systems experiencing problems, many people are feeling skeptical.
The major global Microsoft outage caused significant problems, or in some cases disabled entire services, including emails and artificial intelligence products for millions around the world [BBC].
Microsoft's initial efforts to fix the issues had, by midday UK time, been largely unsuccessful. However, some 22 hours after the outage began, systems were beginning to work again.
Hospitals, GPs and police forces across the UK were hit by the global Microsoft outage, which also disrupted schools, businesses and some travel [Guardian].
Key public services battled to get systems back online amid “widespread” and “serious” disruption to NHS services, as staff resorted to using patients' paper records after being unable to access email and other IT facilities used to deliver healthcare. Patients getting their prescriptions were cautioned about possible delays especially as some GPs refused to accept paper prescriptions despite not being able to receive repeat prescriptions electronically.
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. Lord Harris, chair of the UK's National Preparedness Commission, had recently issued warnings about the dangers of major infrastructure and communications failures just days before the widespread global Microsoft outage on the 13th November 2026 [BBC] and spoke to BBC Radio 4 on Friday and said that both individuals and corporations needed to make better contingency plans for such outages and pointed in particular to the UK government’s be ready campaign https://beready.campaign.gov.uk/ In this regard he pointed to the need to maintain fallback infrastructure. While there is pressure to phase out Freeview TV transmission infrastructure, the same infrastructure is used to broadcast FM radio. This is the same infrastructure upon which the government will rely in a crisis and why it is encouraging the public to have a wind-up or battery powered radio.
The Microsoft disruption reportedly sent some sectors back to the 1990s, with reports of court staff looking for fax machines and rail travellers being warned they may not be able to rely on digital tickets.
It wasn’t just the UK that was sent back to the stone age however. Participants at COP31 struggled at the climate summit in Antalya, Türkiye, as the outage of Microsoft Outlook and Teams crippled communications.
Attendees at the climate change forum were unable to perform functions such as sending emails, managing calendars or hosting virtual meetings.
According to ABC in Australia the Microsoft outage could cost Australian businesses billions of dollars, with experts warning small businesses will be the hardest hit by the technology failure.
RSM Australia Risk Advisory partner Ashwin Pal said the cost to professional service businesses, such as lawyers or accountants, would be hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour.
But it’s a problem that should have been foreseen. A top national security official warned months ago that the Australia's reliance on Microsoft risked a "disproportionate impact" if the tech company ever suffered an significant outage. Speaking on the InnovationAus podcast in August, Home Affairs national security head Hamish Hansford referenced Australia's deep reliance on Microsoft services. "[Big tech providers] underpin our national security. They underpin the functioning of the economy, and they are individually important for how we operate," he said [ABC].
But it’s not just Australia. Nor is it just Microsoft. Resilience and contingency should be built into any system, be it run by a single individual or a large multinational or government infrastructure.
If Microsoft wasn’t accessible, why couldn’t users switch to an alternative provider? Individuals may be able to work around such problems more easily since they could open, or already possess, an email account with another provider. An individual may have local as well as cloud back-ups. However, we may all be reliant on the NHS, or a large banking group that has put all its eggs in one basket. In the US local municipalities, the federal government and court systems were just some of the many entities that reported issues in this latest web services outage.
The Baltimore County Government said employees were "currently unable to send or receive emails due to the widespread Microsoft outage. 911 and other essential County services are NOT affected”. Well, that was a relief that the 911 service wasn’t affected! Though with landlines going digital, and soon to rely on broadband infrastructure, the threat to emergency infrastructure is very real.
None of the major providers have been immune from outages. Only recently Google was itself hit by an outage which affected its cloud services [Guardian]. And the Amazon Web Services outage in 2025 exposed the critical risks of such services going down [Guardian].
Breaking a single one of these three major entities is costly and destructive. But if all of them went down together the western world as we know it would practically seize up to a grinding halt.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) powers millions of websites, mobile apps, streaming platforms, financial institutions, and government agencies worldwide.
Because AWS provides foundational cloud infrastructure, including servers, storage, and databases, an outage in its data centres can disrupt large portions of the Internet
Google’s cloud services are primarily focused on its specific suite of products, as are Microsoft's. However, as has been seen recently, many key companies and important infrastructural organisations can be severely affected when the network goes dark. It is a stark reminder of how much the world has come to rely on technology and the Internet and how vulnerable these systems are to simple glitches [BBC].
Microsoft has since apologised for the issue, which it said was due to a technical failure rather than a cyberattack. However, this is little consolation for the nearly half a billion users around the globe.
tvnewswatch, London, UK
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