Microsoft glitch exposes Britain's reliance on a tiny number of US tech giants on the day digital doom stared us in the face

The fallout from the Microsoft bug that almost 'crashed the world' yesterday is likely to last days, experts warned.Pharmacies, NHS services, police, courts, schools, charities, banks and businesses were all left wrestling with the consequences of the software glitch.Microsoft said it was 'very sorry' for the outage of its servers that affected up to 430million users across 74 countries – but warned the trouble would last another 48 hours.Experts said the meltdown was a wake-up call that exposes how reliant Britain's services are on a handful of powerful US tech firms.Professor Junaid Arshad, head of computer science at Birmingham City University, said it was a stark reminder of the 'profound risks', saying the bug's 'cascading real-world impact on government and public services is immense'.As problems rumbled on across the country, the National Pharmacy Association warned there would be delays to some NHS prescriptions, while the email shutdown gave many small companies a headache on payday.Police could not collect crime reports online and told people to phone 999 or 101 instead.Some firms resorted to old-fashioned fax machines, while NHS England said staff were 'enacting long-standing measures' such as 'using paper records'. At least 47 NHS trusts reported problems, along with 25 out of 44 police force areas and at least 116 primary and secondary schools. The fallout from the Microsoft bug that almost 'crashed the world' yesterday is likely to last days, experts warnedAn 'underlying software bug' struck around 6pm on Thursday, crippling Microsoft's Outlook email, along with applications such as Word, Excel and Teams.Engineers scrambled to fix the glitch but it took them 20 hours to get a hold on it, making it one of the worst IT meltdowns in years.The GMB union's national secretary Rachel Harrison said the outage had a 'serious impact' on ambulance services. She said staff working in 111 and 999 were unable to refer patients in the normal way, 'creating a massive backlog'.Emergency and life-threatening callouts were not affected.The NHS said it was 'inevitably having a disruptive impact'.Dr Tim Frank, a GP in Penzance, Cornwall, said Microsoft products were central to primary care and the outage was 'very disruptive'. It stopped some patients being referred to district nurses and hospital outpatient services.Courts were also hit, with some juries sent home or prisoners not arriving at court. At Manchester Crown Court, Judge Maurice Greene told a jury: 'What we are learning is the dangers of our reliability on computer systems.'It was unlucky Friday the 13th for people moving home too, with whole chains of house sales reliant on emails between estate agents, banks and solicitors.Jeremy Leaf, an estate agent in north London, said customers were being advised 'to try to use telephones or even communicate by hand'. Councils said some services had been affected, while National Rail said customers had been unable to access email tickets.Further afield, Australia's intelligence services had operations 'affected', Singapore's tax authority went down and the Japanese government's IT system was hit. A jail in Colorado said it was unable to release prisoners.City firm Morningstar estimated that globally the crash will have cost insurers up to $500million.Microsoft's executive vice-president Charles Lamanna ruled out a cyber-attack and offered 'regret' for 'the impact'. He said services were being gradually restored.An extended 48-hour email timeout window was put in place to allow delayed messages to arrive.It said 'some users may continue to experience intermittent issues,' but stressed it was working with 'urgency' to find a full fix.Experts said lessons need to be learned. The Commons' science and technology committee's chairwoman Dame Chi Onwurah condemned the 'lack of resilience in the UK's digital infrastructure', saying it has exposed how Britain 'is hugely dependent on a small number of US-based technology providers for our public services'.But cyber minister Baroness Lloyd of Effra said there had been 'limited reports of impact on frontline service delivery'. She said she had spoken to Microsoft UK's chief executive Darren Hardman, adding: 'We will review this incident and the lessons learned.'Microsoft has promised to explain what went wrong 'after recovery is complete' by publishing 'a full post-incident report'.Yesterday scammers wasted no time by hitting the phones and offering to 'help' potential victims, urging them to divulge passwords to 'restore Microsoft services'.Marketing departments were also quick off the mark. The Royal Mail tweeted a photo of a red postbox, saying: 'No inbox, no problem. Ours is always open.'