Sheffield council and South Yorkshire Police hit by global Microsoft outage as fix not working ‘as expected’
The issue began late on Thursday afternoon and has seen hundreds of thousands of users unable to access many of Microsoft’s most popular services.
Microsoft is scrambling to find new ways to restore services after a global outage has left users worldwide - and here in Sheffield - without access to emails and Teams as it admitted fixes were not going “as expected”.
South Yorkshire Police (SYP) are urging people to use 999 for emergencies and 101 for non-emergency issues as their emails are currently down.
Similarly, Sheffield City Council have a message on their website asking [people to contact them by telephone if the need is urgent as access to some of their systems is impacted.
The issue began late on Thursday afternoon and has seen users unable to access many of its most popular services, with thousands worldwide reporting they are unable to send and receive emails through Outlook.
Teams has also been affected for many, with the tech giant’s Copilot AI assistant and other Microsoft 365 services also disrupted.
Monitoring website Downdetector first showed a spike in users reporting problems with Microsoft Teams in the UK at around 6.15pm on Thursday, with more than 130,000 reporting Outlook issues in the US at its peak last night.
Microsoft executive vice-president Charles Lamanna said the outages did not appear to be the result of a cyber attack.
The firm said it had tried several solutions to mitigate the problems, including isolating parts of its infrastructure and shifting traffic to alternate routes.
“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed that change is not taking as expected,” the company said.
In its most latest update on Microsoft 365 products, it said it was seeing “positive results for server stability” .
“We’ll continue to monitor its progress and are working to expand it to servers supporting active regions coming online,” it said.
The group stressed it was “not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident”.
It added: “We will continue to treat this incident with urgency and priority until full resolution.
“Once mitigated, we will provide full details of the root cause.”
Users from 74 countries reported issues with Microsoft services in the space of an hour on Thursday, according to Downdetector.
Problems were flagged from a range of countries, including the UK, US, India and New Zealand.
Reports about Outlook peaked at more than 2,000 times their normal level, the monitoring site added.
On Friday, users from around 60 countries, mainly in Europe and Asia, continue to record trouble.
Governments, courts, charities and banks around the world have also reported Microsoft outages.
Japan’s National Disaster Management Agency said in a post on social media: “Due to the ongoing widespread Microsoft 365 outage, the Disaster Management Agency is also currently unable to send or receive email.
“Please contact us by calling our main number or the direct number for the relevant department.”
The Government of Western Australia said it is experiencing issues with its portals, telephone and email.
Samaritans said: “We are experiencing difficulty accessing email (both sending and receiving), accessing shared documents stored in the cloud, and accessing other Microsoft cloud services.”
Alberta Courts, in Canada, said: “Members of the public, counsel, and parties may experience delays or difficulties when communicating with the Court or receiving responses to inquiries.
“Delays may also affect the receipt and processing of electronically submitted materials.”
One of the biggest banks in Malaysia, Maybank, warned customers of scams as it said “email communications may experience delays at this time”.
“We also advise customers to remain vigilant against scams,” the bank added on X.