Big concerns around UK reliance on Microsoft after massive downtime
Dame Chi Onwurah (Chair of Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee) says that the global outage of Microsoft services on Friday (13 November) is an example of why the UK needs to reduce its reliance on foreign tech companies.
“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,” she said.
“My committee’s report on delivering a digital government concluded that the UK is hugely dependent on a small number of US-based technology providers for our public services, preventing homegrown alternatives from developing.
“In its response, the government could not tell us how much it was spending on IT and digital or who it was spending it with – without even knowing this, how can we protect against vendor lock-in or achieve the resilience and digital sovereignty the UK needs.”
Massive outage
Global software giant Microsoft was hit by a major global service outage on Friday, with Outlook, Teams, Cloud. and other Microsoft 365 products affected.
In a statement on social media, Microsoft confirmed it is investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas. It added that the issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region.
Microsoft confirmed that the issue was because a ‘portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors’. Reported affected areas across their updates and status pages include:
- Exchange Online/Outlook
- Teams
- SharePoint Online
- Copilot
- Microsoft Graph (for Exchange data)
- Defender XDR/Defender for Office 365
- Intune
- Planner
- To Do
- Purview services
- Power BI/Fabric elements
- Windows 365 Cloud PCs
- Universal Print
- Certain admin center pages.
“We regret that today’s outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue. There is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity,” said Charles Lamanna (EVP of Copilot, Agents, and Platform at Microsoft).
