Following a similar shutdown affecting services delivered by rival Amazon Web Services, issues that impacted the software giant’s popular productivity and cloud tools caused difficulties in Whitehall, it has emerged
The recent significant outage affecting core Microsoft tools disrupted various citizen services delivered by several government departments, a minister has indicated.
On 29 October, the software vendor acknowledged “reports of issues accessing Microsoft 365 services” from users around the world, and went on to reveal that it had “identified portions of internal infrastructure that are experiencing connectivity issues”.
The issues in question lasted 10 hours and affected Azure services as well as M365, with impacted UK organisations reported at the time to include Heathrow Airport and NatWest. Members of the Scottish Parliament were also required to go home earlier than planned after the outage caused the suspension of the chamber’s electronic voting system in the Holyrood chamber.
Now, in answer to a parliamentary question from Conservative MP Ben Spencer, digital government minister Ian Murray said that the tech interference had also caused issues for Whitehall agencies and the services they deliver to the public. The extent of the disruption – in government and beyond – is still being investigated, with this work being led by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.
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“DSIT is leading government’s response to the Microsoft Azure outage that took place on Wednesday 29 October 2025,” Murray said. “We understand that all Azure services were restored on Wednesday evening, and DSIT is in contact with Microsoft to understand how such events can be mitigated in the future.”
The minister added: “DSIT has identified disruption to online Government services across several departments, which were restored within hours of the incident. We are not aware of any major disruption arising from this event affecting Critical National Infrastructure but will continue to work with relevant operators to understand the full impact. The outage affected a wide range of organisations across all sectors and it will take some time to fully understand the scale of the economic impact.”
The tech department’s probe of the Azure and M365 incident is running alongside a concurrent investigation of a major outage affecting Amazon Web Services that took place the week before the Microsoft issues.
Other recent comments made by Murray indicated that the AWS “outage affected a number of suppliers and departments, and it will take some time to fully understand the scale of the impact; DSIT will be gathering a full picture of the impact on government in the coming weeks”.
