Schools, NHS services and GP practices across Scotland disrupted by global Microsoft outage 

Schools, NHS services and GP practices are among thousands of organisations across Scotland impacted this morning by a global Microsoft outage.

At least 17 public bodies, including Police Scotland, 13 of the country’s 32 councils, two NHS boards and Scottish Water have reported problems with email and online services.

State-owned ferry operator CalMac was also hit, bringing the public total known so far to 18.

The outage centres on Exchange Online, Microsoft’s email service, and has disrupted features of other Microsoft 365 products that depend on it, including Teams, SharePoint, Copilot and Defender XDR.

The impact was mostly on email, Teams and web contact forms rather than frontline systems. Bodies told the public to phone instead, with emergency services numbers 999 and 101 unaffected by the glitch.

The clearest clinical impact reported so far is in NHS Grampian, where some GP practices lost access to their Vision patient-record system.

“NHS Grampian is affected by the Outlook outage this morning which means that staff and services are currently unable to access e-mails. Telephone lines and all other systems are working as normal. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause and hope the situation will be resolved by Microsoft as quickly as possible,” a spokesperson for the health board said.

Schools and GP services across the Stirling and Forth Valley areas have also been hit, with parents advised to contact schools by phone or apps like Seesaw.

And Police Scotland said on X: “Due to the global Microsoft outage, our online forms are affected, including ContactUs. We are unable to receive any emails, and there may be a delay in responding to any forms sent to us in the last 24 hours as this outage continues.Non-emergency? Call 101. Emergency? Call 999.”

Microsoft 365 problems were first reported in the UK at around 6pm yesterday and carried on into Friday morning. Users in more than 70 countries were affected, according to the Scotsman and outage website Downdetector logged almost 140,000 reports around the peak, per Deadline News.

Microsoft blamed an “elevated load” on part of its infrastructure across several regions and said there was no sign of a cyber attack, according to CBS/AP. And despite reports the Redmond, Virginia-headquartered tech giant had ‘stabilised’, the company is yet to recover systems and the outage is ongoing.

There has been no formal apology as yet from the $3.8 trillion valued company, but Microsoft executive vice-president Charles Lamanna posted on X: “We regret that today’s outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue.” In the same post he said “there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity.”

Scottish public services affected: