European stock market operator has advised ⁠listed companies on Friday morning to use the telephone to ⁠communicate corporate information after ⁠an ​outage in Microsoft's Outlook email service.

"Euronext Corporate Actions and ⁠Listing teams are currently experiencing an email communication disruption and are unable to ⁠receive emails," the company, which ​runs exchanges in Paris, ‌Brussels, Lisbon, ‌Amsterdam, Oslo, Athens and Milan, said in ‌a corporate filing ().

The UK's reports problems with its email too:

We are currently experiencing problems sending and receiving emails due to the worldwide Microsoft outage. Our Adjudicator Office service is also impacted.

NHS sources said the healthcare system in the UK was experiencing "widespread" and "serious" disruption, with staff reporting being unable to access email and IT systems they use to deliver healthcare, .

Some NHS organisations took to social media to apologise, and urged patients not to email and use the telephone to contact them instead (see earlier blogpost).

Pharmacy sources told the Guardian they were also unable to access email, and said the Microsoft outage was affecting their ability to communicate with some GP surgeries about prescriptions. This was having a "significant" impact on patient waiting times for medicines, they said.

A spokesperson said:

"We are aware of the disruption impacting pharmacies today, including access to NHS email systems, due to national issues with Microsoft. This affects a pharmacy's ability to communicate with GP practices and some patients.

"Please bear with your pharmacy teams today, where waits may be longer than normal and there may be delays to some prescriptions."

Microsoft's share price is down 2.6% in pre-market trading, as traders digest the impact of this serious, ongoing outage to its services.

head of equity research at wealth manager has a good take:

"Microsoft's latest outage highlights both the strength and vulnerability of its position in enterprise technology. Its products are so deeply embedded in how businesses operate that even a relatively short disruption can have widespread consequences.

"From an investment perspective, the direct financial impact is likely to be negligible. The more interesting question is whether repeated outages begin to change how businesses think about their dependence on a single technology provider. For now, Microsoft's scale, entrenched customer relationships and high switching costs remain formidable competitive advantages.

"The irony is that the same market dominance that makes Microsoft such an attractive business also magnifies the consequences when things go wrong."

Just in: Microsoft reports it is making progress in its ongoing fight to get its services online.

But the company's services are still not back to normal.

In an (delayed) update to its 'current status' message, says:

Recovery efforts are ongoing across impacted infrastructure. We are seeing early signs of stabilization, but service capacity has not yet returned to normal levels and health remains variable as traffic is carefully reintroduced.

Our primary mitigation path continues to focus on service stability and controlled recovery. Engineering teams are cycling affected infrastructure through traffic drain, restart, remediation, and staged return-to-service while monitoring closely. We are also evaluating additional mitigation options to improve recovery speed and consistency. Network and traffic-management actions remain in progress, and we continue to prioritize backlog and queue health to preserve delayed mail during recovery.

adds that it is extending the "email timeout window" to 48 hours to help protect delayed messages while service recovery continues.

It adds:

At this time, we are not aware of any malicious activity causing this incident. We will continue to treat this with urgency until full mitigation, and we will share a full Post-Incident Report with root cause and defense-in-depth actions after recovery is complete.

If you've been impacted by the Microsoft outage, we'd like to hear how:

The UK health service is experiencing problems accessing Microsoft services today.

And no wonder, as NHS England has a major five-year deal to use Microsoft 365.

So email will be disrupted by the ongoing outage, as will Teams, which is used for a range of services including remote therapy sessions.

The Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust (CNWL) has reported disruption to Microsoft services, including Outlook and Teams, warning:

Patients: please call your usual CNWL service rather than emailing until further notice. Emails may not be received.

We apologise for any inconvenience.

(one of the regional health boards of NHS Scotland) also flagged problems, saying:

NHS Grampian is experiencing issues due to the Outlook outage, affecting some GP practices' access to Hosted Vision systems. Telephone lines and other systems are operational. We apologise for any inconvenience and hope Microsoft resolves the issue soon.

, which offers mental health, learning disability and autism services for people in the Greater Manchester area, reports that people should still attend appointments as usual, saying:

We're aware of an ongoing issue affecting Microsoft, including Outlook. This should not affect any systems used for care or your appointments, please attend as planned. There's no need to call and check. The main impact is on staff emails.

And anectotally, my local GP surgery in Oxford reports that its Outlook services are down this morning (they were still conducting appointments, though).

Contingency plans are being put in place across Whitehall (the heart of the UK government) to minimise the impact of Microsoft's technical problems on government services.

A UK overnment spokesman said:

"We are aware of the ongoing global technical issues affecting Microsoft services.

"We are working closely with Microsoft to assess any impact on government services, with robust contingency plans in place to minimise disruption."

[Reminder, Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry, stated earlier this morning that government engineers were working with Microsoft to address the problems].

Several UK police forces have urged people not to report crimes online, due to the Microsoft outage, and to telephone them instead.

In a statement on X, Hertfordshire Police told the public:

Due to a global Microsoft service issue, some online form submissions on our website (https://orlo.uk/4YQgb) may be affected.

If your report is time-critical but not an emergency, please call 101. In an emergency, call 999.

also urged people to report crimes or 'time-critical' information by phone, explaining:

Due to a global Microsoft service issue, we are currently unable to receive online form submissions. Until this is resolved, if your report is time-critical but not an emergency, please dial 101.

If your report can wait until Microsoft restores its service, please submit an online form once you are able to do so. If a crime is in progress or a life is in danger, call 999.

In a post on Facebook, said they were experiencing technical issues with receiving reports made via its website form.

And a spokesperson for said:

"We're aware of global issues affecting Microsoft Outlook this evening, which have impacted our ability to receive online reports via the website as well as our general contact centre email address.

"Until these issues are resolved, if you need to make a non-urgent report, please call us on 101 or send a direct message to this Facebook account. In an emergency, always dial 999."

UK schools who use Microsoft services may have trouble communicating with parents today.

One London school said emails would be delayed until the issue with Outlook is resolved and that parents and carers should phone in if their child would be absent today.

A second school in the capital warned parents that it currently had limited, or no, access to services such as Outlook (emails) and Teams (virtual meetings). Parents should phone to report attendance and absences, it added.

In Salisbury, urged anyone needing to contact the school to do so by phone, posting on Facebook:

"If you are just waking up to the news today, Microsoft emails and teams are down globally.

"This will affect our communication today, however, in a tech world, our teaching is practical, innovative and fun and your children will have no idea."

The UK government spends at least £1.9bn on Microsoft software each year, so the outage could potentially cause disruption to a range of services.

British government engineers are working with Microsoft to assess the impact of the outage, according to a UK minister.

However, he could not confirm whether any government systems had been affected.

Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry, told :

"Government engineers and the systems are working with Microsoft at the moment. I would expect that to be able to be detailed throughout the day. But as more people come online with their working days shortly, I think there'll be sadly more people frustrated with the system."

"The understanding that I have from Downing Street on this is that government systems are being looked at in relation to Microsoft. "

Across Europe, millions of Microsoft customers will have woken up to the news that the company is strugging to get its services back online.

The disruption, which began around 6pm GMT on Thursday, has disrupted key Microsoft services such as , and . Initially mainly affecting US users, it has gone on to cause disruption across the Asia-Pacific region.

Microsoft has suggested the outage may have been caused by issues with the settings applied to servers responsible for keeping Microsoft 365 up and running. It says it doesn't believe it is suffering a cyber attack.

And it became clear that the problem was pretty serious when the company admitted that the fix was "not taking as expected".

The outage hit government agencies in Australia, Japan and the United States, as well as companies including two massive AI companies – OpenAI and Anthropic.

In Japan, the economy, trade and industry minister said the disruption had had a "major impact," on the world's fourth-biggest economy.

The latest word from Microsoft is that it is seeing "positive results for server stability" after applying a software patch.

But despite that, the company still reports "Service degradation on Microsoft 365 (Business or Enterprise) and Microsoft consumer products".

The Microsoft outage has caused disruption among companies and government ministries in Japan, forcing staff to turn to analogue methods to distribute information and contact clients, our colleague Justin McCurry reports from Tokyo.

The digital minister, , said the government's email services had become unavailable and that it would temporarily use other formats, including text messaging, as an "emergency measure".

The economy, trade and industry minister, , conceded that the disruption had had a "major impact," on the world's fourth-biggest economy. "Since this software is used by a vast number of people, we will closely monitor the situation and take every possible measure to address it," he said, according to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.

The realisation that something was wrong hit as soon as employees tried to log on this morning, with social media flooded with complaints from users who were unable to check work emails.

The government confirmed the outage had disrupted a shared network the digital agency uses to send information to ministries and other official bodies.

The chaos also seeped into the private sector. The shipping firm , which uses Outlook, said it was unable to accept online reservations for its hands-free luggage service at airports and train stations, according to the Kyodo news agency.

, a major pharmaceutical company, said it was having to handle orders by phone.

Outlook is also used by Japan's defence ministry and the cabinet office, which said it would pin notices on bulletin boards to notify media organisations of upcoming press conferences.

The meteorological agency said it does not use Microsoft to issue special weather and earthquake warnings to local governments.

Just in: Microsoft reports it is seeing some 'positive results' in its efforts to get its services back online for millions of customers around the world.

In a new updates to the status page for its Microsoft 365 (Business or Enterprise) products, it says:

Current status: We're seeing positive results for server stability after applying an upstream authentication/routing configuration component patch to a portion of our infrastructure. We'll continue to monitor its progress and are working to expand it to servers supporting active regions coming online.

also reiterates that it doesn't think the disruption is due to a hacking attack, saying:

As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident. 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, defense-in-depth repair items, and more within a Post-Incident Report.

Consumers, as well as businesses, are suffering disruption.

reports that 'the issue' affecting is affecting Outlook.com, OneDrive, OneNote, Microsoft To Do, Teams, and Microsoft 365 for the web – although there may be problems with other Microsoft 365 services too.