Digitally paralysed: Microsoft’s global outage overnight impacted the police, pharmacies and GPs, Cheltenham racecourse… and even Croydon Council
Jason Perry’s “digital first” council bumbled into further troubles today, as staff working in Fisher’s Folly and around the borough found themselves struggling to perform even the simplest of online functions related to council services due to the global Microsoft outage.
Croydon residents wanting to report something as arcane as another missed bin collection by rubbish contractors Veolia, having logged the complaint via the council’s CrapApp, were unable to complete their report because Croydon Council requires a confirmation that was included in an email that few would be able to access…
The failure of Microsoft services affected the Outlook email system, the Teams meeting tool and its AI “assistant”, Copilot.
Inside Croydon is happy to report, however, that the council’s distinctly analogue street sweepers are out and about with their brooms, sweeping Croydon’s streets. No need for Copilot there.
The Microsoft outage was first noticed in the United States yesterday, around 6pm London time. But as the business day began across the Asia-Pacific area, and then in Europe, it became apparent that this was a global outage of service for the world’s biggest computer software supplier.
Microsoft’s business is reckoned to be worth almost $4trillion (a trillion is 12 zeroes…).
It has been a bad couple of weeks for American “Tech Bros”, following the outcome of the US mid-term elections and yesterday’s resignation of chip-maker Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang, the single act wiping more than £135billion off the company’s share value in a single day.
The Microsoft outage also affected two massive AI companies – OpenAI and Anthropic.
In Britain, GPs, the police and pharmacies were among the services affected by the outage.
You’ve bin done: the council said it was sending emails to residents who submitted reports via its CrapApp – at a time during the Microsoft outage when no one could access their emails
Even Cheltenham racecourse was forced to issue an urgent plea to racegoers to arrive early, because there was no assurance that their digital ticketing system would be working properly.
The Metropolitan Police issued a statement saying online forms may be affected by the outage. They urged people to call 101 with time-critical but non-emergency reports.
The London Ambulance Service’s critical platforms do not use Microsoft so were unaffected by the outage.
Heathrow, Manchester and Stansted airports were operating as usual – unlike Croydon Council, they do not use Microsoft-dependent systems.
A government spokesperson said it was “working closely” with Microsoft to assess “any impact on government services”.
Microsoft said the outage may have been caused by issues with the settings applied to servers responsible for keeping Microsoft 365 up and running. It said it doesn’t believe it is suffering a cyber attack.
Its status report at 10am read: “Recovery actions are ongoing and have progressed in phases across affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure. Global telemetry and customer reports show incremental improvement in several workloads; however, service health remains variable and capacity has not yet fully returned to baseline.”
So that’s absolutely clear then.
Email inboxes around the world, and in Fisher’s Folly, began to splutter back to life by 10.30am.
Croydon’s road sweepers, meanwhile, continued with their work, oblivious to their “digital first” council’s problems.
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