In the UK, multiple police forces have said they are unable to accept online crime reports due to the outages of Microsoft services, though phone lines for emergency and nonemergency reports remained available. Parts of the National Health Service, including doctor surgeries and hospital services, also reported that some services were impacted by the outages. “Those who work in 111 and 999 services are unable to refer patients in the normal way—creating a massive backlog,” the GMB trade union posted on X, referring to nonemergency and emergency health services.
Meanwhile, Deutsche Bahn, the provider of train services across Germany, updated its alerts page saying the email outages “severely restricts the sending of timetables.” Courts, local government agencies, and media organizations in the Netherlands reported issues with their communications services, according to local press. In France, some health agencies and local governments also reported similar issues. One winemaker in South Africa told the BBC his company had been brought to a standstill by the outages.
Unsurprisingly, these disruptions continued to be echoed across Canada and the US as millions of people have attempted to sign on. Canadian rail service Via Rail posted online that customers may not receive details of their booked trips via email, with with York’s Department of Investigation posting on X that housing evictions planned for Friday had been canceled and Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office, in Colorado, also posting on X that a lack of email notifications means bond payments being made online were not being processed.
“It’s literally named 365. That implies a specific duty,” says longtime security and compliance consultant Davi Ottenheimer. “Can’t sell an empty bottle called ‘Bottle of Water.’”
During the outage, multiple officials around the world called for countries to rely less on giant tech firms or reevaluate their relationships. “The global Microsoft outage only serves to highlight once again the lack of resilience in the UK’s digital infrastructure, and the dangers that this dependency can pose to our security, economy and public services,” Chi Onwurah, the chair of the UK parliament’s Science and Technology Committee, said in a statement.
Since the start of the second Trump administration—with its chaos, unpredictability, and threats changing the nature of international relationships—countries across Europe and other parts of the world have been starting to change their attitudes and reliance on some US-based big technology firms, such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services. Officials in France have been developing local, open source alternatives to Zoom, Teams, and other productivity software, while WIRED has documented dozens of other European efforts to ditch US big tech services.
Patnekar, from Indian security firm Shreshta, says that while much tech infrastructure has been provided by centralized services in recent years, email seems particularly challenging to create resiliency. “Ultimately, the lesson isn’t necessarily that organisations should stop relying on large technology providers,” Patnekar says. “Rather, they need to identify which services are genuinely mission-critical and ensure they have an independent fallback when those providers become unavailable.”
