Wigan organisations left without access to emails and other services due to global Microsoft outage

Wigan Warriors, Greater Manchester Police, schools and GP surgeries in the borough are among the many organisations around the world struggling to access online services due to a Microsoft outage.

The firm is scrambling to find new ways to restore services as users cannot access emails and Teams, but it admitted fixes were not going “as expected”.

The issue began late on Thursday afternoon and has seen users unable to access many of its most popular services, with thousands worldwide reporting they are unable to send and receive emails through Outlook.

Teams has also been affected for many, with the tech giant’s Copilot AI assistant and other Microsoft 365 services also disrupted.

Wigan Warriors announced it was experiencing “disruption” to its email services on Friday morning, while West Lancashire Council reported it was also affected and Greater Manchester Police is facing problems with online forms.

Schools including Standish High, Lowton High and Billinge St Aidan’s CE Primary have been affected, as well as a number of GP surgeries in the borough, such as Ashton Medical Centre, Standish Medical Practice and Pennygate Medical Centre

Monitoring website Downdetector first showed a spike in users reporting problems with Microsoft Teams in the UK at around 6.15pm on Thursday, with more than 130,000 reporting Outlook issues in the US at its peak last night.

Microsoft executive vice-president Charles Lamanna said the outages did not appear to be the result of a cyber attack.

The firm said it had tried several solutions to mitigate the problems, including isolating parts of its infrastructure and shifting traffic to alternate routes.

“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed that change is not taking as expected,” the company said.

In its latest update on Microsoft 365 products, it said it was seeing “positive results for server stability” .

“We’ll continue to monitor its progress and are working to expand it to servers supporting active regions coming online,” it said.

The group stressed it was “not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident”.

It added: “We will continue to treat this incident with urgency and priority until full resolution.

“Once mitigated, we will provide full details of the root cause.”

Users from 74 countries reported issues with Microsoft services in the space of an hour on Thursday, according to Downdetector.

Problems were flagged from a range of countries, including the UK, US, India and New Zealand.

Reports about Outlook peaked at more than 2,000 times their normal level, the monitoring site added.

On Friday, users from around 60 countries, mainly in Europe and Asia, continue to record trouble.

Governments, courts, charities and banks around the world have also reported Microsoft outages.