Microsoft 365 is back up! Tech giant says outage that crippled NHS, police, businesses, courts and schools is over (now we've just got to plough through all those unread e-mails)

Published: 07:14 EST, 14 November 2026 | Updated: 07:17 EST, 14 November 2026 Microsoft 365 has been fully restored following a major global outage that crippled police forces, the NHS, businesses, courts and schools. The technology giant said this morning it had restored services to the remaining customers affected by one of the worst IT failures in years.Office workers joked online they now have hundreds of emails to go through after they were unable to log in to their accounts for hours on Friday. One person posted a meme with the caption: 'Me replying to the 1039 emails in the hour of work after enjoying the Microsoft outage a little too much. 'They could have waited just a little longer to fix it... more coffee please!!' Another shared an AI video of a cat furiously typing with the caption: 'When Microsoft fixed the outage, and now I'm sick of replying to all the work emails.' This morning, the US-based firm posted on its Microsoft 365 status page: 'We have completed our efforts to address the underlying issue of the incident and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions.'Further updates can be found at MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center.'The UK Government was forced to put in place contingency measures due to the outage, while Microsoft scrambled to restore services after they began to go down from 6pm GMT on Thursday. Office workers joked online they now have hundreds of emails to go through after they were unable to log in to their accounts for hours on Friday One shared an AI video of a cat furiously typing with the caption: 'When Microsoft fixed the outage, and now I'm sick of replying to all the work emails.'Microsoft on Friday said the outage was caused by a 'technical issue not related to cyber or AI agents'.Government cyber minister Baroness Lloyd of Effra said the issue mainly affected back-office functions, with contingency measures put in place.But she acknowledged there had been 'limited reports of impact on frontline service delivery' and the incident had been 'inconvenient and disruptive'.The minister said she had spoken to Microsoft UK's chief executive, Darren Hardman, about the situation.More than 430 million people use Microsoft's suite of online apps. Monitoring website Downdetector first showed a spike in users reporting problems with Microsoft Teams in the UK at about 6.15pm on Thursday. Millions of its customers were unable to send and receive emails through Outlook, with Teams and the tech giant's Copilot AI assistant also affected. Other AI chat services were disrupted, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude.Police forces in England and Wales said on Friday they were unable to receive crime reports online.Meanwhile, NHS England said health service staff were 'enacting long-standing measures' to overcome IT outages, including using paper records.