In the United Kingdom, several police forces said they could not accept online crime reports due to outages in Microsoft services, although phone lines for emergency and non-emergency reports remained available. Parts of the National Health Service, including GP surgeries and hospital wards, also reported that some services had been affected by the outages. “Those working in 111 and 999 services are unable to refer patients in the normal way, creating a huge backlog,” the GMB union posted on X, referring to non-urgent and emergency health services.
Meanwhile, Deutsche Bahn, the provider of rail services across Germany, updated its alerts page saying that email outages “severely restrict the sending of timetables.” Courts, local government agencies and media outlets in the Netherlands have reported problems with their communications services, according to local press. In France, some health agencies and local governments have also reported similar problems. A South African winemaker told the BBC his business had been paralyzed by the outages.
Unsurprisingly, these disruptions continued to reverberate across Canada and the United States, as millions of people attempted to register. Canadian rail service Via Rail posted online that customers may not receive details of their booked trips via email, with the York Department of Investigation posting on X that housing evictions scheduled for Friday had been canceled and the Arapahoe County, Colorado, Sheriff’s Office also posting on
“It’s literally called 365. That implies a specific obligation,” says Davi Ottenheimer, a longtime security and compliance consultant. “I can’t sell an empty bottle called a ‘Water Bottle.’ »
During the outage, several officials around the world called on countries to rely less on giant tech companies or reevaluate their relationships. “Microsoft’s global outage only highlights once again the lack of resilience in the UK’s digital infrastructure and the dangers this dependence can pose to our security, economy and public services,” Chi Onwurah, 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 relations – countries in Europe and other parts of the world have started to change their attitude and rely on some large US-based technology companies, such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services. French officials have developed homegrown, open-source alternatives to Zoom, Teams and other productivity software, while WIRED has documented dozens of other European efforts to ditch big U.S. tech services.
Patnekar, of Indian security firm Shreshta, says that while much of the technology infrastructure has been delivered by centralized services in recent years, email seems particularly difficult to create resilience. “Ultimately, the lesson is not necessarily that organizations should stop relying on big technology vendors,” Patnekar says. “Rather, they must identify which services are truly mission critical and ensure they have an independent fallback when those providers become unavailable.” »
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