Microsoft outage hits Edinburgh and Lothians councils, schools and NHS services
The global outage remains unfixed after services went down last night
Councils, schools and NHS services across Edinburgh and the Lothians are currently only contactable by telephone after a global Microsoft outage.
The City of Edinburgh Council, East Lothian Council, Midlothian Council and West Lothian Council are unable to send and receive emails while the tech giant works with “urgency” to restore access to emails, Teams and its AI assistant Co-pilot.
Despite the outage, NHS Lothian said planned appointments will still go ahead.
A spokesperson said: “NHS Lothian's email system has been affected by the global Microsoft outage, however, all services are continuing as normal, and patients should attend their scheduled appointments as planned unless they are contacted directly and advised otherwise.”
Online forms have also been hampered by the outage with all four councils warning that their phone lines are likely to be busy.
Taking to X, East Lothian and Edinburgh’s councils said anyone wanting to get in contact with their child’s school will need to call the school directly.
East Lothian Council added: “Due to a worldwide Microsoft outage, we are not able to send and receive emails at present.
“If you need to contact the council, please contact us by telephone. Our main number is 01620 827827.”
Issues with Microsoft 365 first emerged on Thursday evening and the company have since confirmed that it was not caused by a cyber-security attack.
Work to restore systems are currently ongoing, with initial fixes “not taking as expected”.
On its status page, the tech giant said: “We are seeing early signs of stabilisation, but service capacity has not yet returned to normal levels and health remains variable as traffic is carefully reintroduced.”
Contact information for those looking to get in touch with the council or schools can be found on their websites where updates will be reportedly provided once the issue is fixed.