Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 products have been experiencing disruption since Thursday evening leaving millions of users unable to access their email.

The outage began around 6pm on Thursday evening when Down Detector showed a spike in issues associated with Microsoft 365. According to Microsoft the problems are not the result of malicious activity but instead the result of a configuration update that caused some servers to become overloaded.

As of this morning the Law Library, the Bar Library in Belfast, the Courts Service and the Legal Aid Board have all reported that their email systems are down while the Law Society of Northern Ireland have issued advice to solicitors on how to manage the disruption, reminding them to maintain client confidentiality when using alternative communication systems, but also to be vigilant against any opportunistic security threats.

Outside of the legal profession schools, hospitals and government departments have also been affected. The outage has had a global impact as so many public and private entities across the world rely on Microsoft for their digital infrastructure.

The outage comes a few months after France announced that it was moving away from Microsoft Windows in a push for “tech sovereignty” fearing that critical digital systems were too deeply tied to foreign providers.

French Minister of Public Action and Accounts David Amiel said: “We must become less reliant on American tools and regain control of our digital destiny. We can no longer accept that our data, our infrastructure, and our strategic decisions depend on solutions whose rules, pricing, evolution, and risks we do not control.”

Anne Le Hénanff, Minister Delegate for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Technology, added: “Digital sovereignty is not an option, it is a strategic necessity.”

France’s decision came in the context of President Trump’s attacks on foreign leaders and sanctions on members of the International Criminal Court, but the wider issue of so many of the world’s businesses and public sector organisations being reliant one system has been highlighted by today’s outage.