Daniel Wolfram
Microsoft has somewhat paralysed many of the important services in the UK.
Many of Microsoft’s services, including its email service Outlook and Microsoft Teams, are still down after there was an outage last night.
Many sectors around the UK are paralysed because Microsoft’s platforms are essential to their work.
The government is now in the midst of trying to come up with a plan in case Microsoft is not able to fix the problems.
A contingency plan in place
In Whitehall, at the heart of the UK government, the outage is making it hard for the government to conduct business as usual.
For example, many of the UK police forces are not able to receive crime reports online due to Microsoft Outlook’s services being down.
However, the government is assessing how it should proceed so it minimises the problems around the country.
“We are aware of the ongoing global technical issues affecting Microsoft services. We are working closely with Microsoft to assess any impact on government services, with robust contingency plans in place to minimise disruption,” a UK government spokesman said to The Guardian.
UK engineers are helping Microsoft
Furthermore, the NHS, the UK’s national health service, is also reporting issues with Microsoft’s services. This will affect remote therapy sessions and other services.
The NHS is urging patients to call instead of emailing until further notice. According to the NHS, the healthcare system is experiencing “widespread” and serious” disruptions.
One part of the contingency plan is to get British tech support engineers to assist Microsoft and assess the damage.
“Government engineers and the systems are working with Microsoft at the moment. The understanding that I have from Downing Street on this is that government systems are being looked at in relation to Microsoft,” Luke Pollard, Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry, told Times Radio.
UPDATE: Microsoft are now seing seeing early signs of stabilization
Microsoft just posted an update. It reads:
“Recovery efforts are ongoing across impacted infrastructure. We are seeing early signs of stabilization, but service capacity has not yet returned to normal levels and health remains variable as traffic is carefully reintroduced.”
