Microsoft has said its email services are approaching normal levels as it continues to recover from a major global outage that disrupted public services, businesses and millions of users across the UK.

The fault, which began on Thursday evening, affected a range of Microsoft products including Outlook, Teams, Copilot and Microsoft 365, causing widespread disruption for organisations that rely on the software giant's systems for day-to-day operations.

In London, the impact was felt across major institutions including the Metropolitan Police, London Fire Brigade, the Houses of Parliament and the Supreme Court. Schools, NHS trusts, local authorities and businesses across the capital also reported difficulties accessing email and other online services.

Downdetector first showed a spike in reports of problems with Microsoft Teams shortly after 6pm on Thursday, before the disruption spread to other services.

Microsoft said efforts to restore systems overnight had initially encountered setbacks after servers brought back online suffered further failures. By Friday afternoon, however, the company said recovery was progressing.

"We're continuing to see improvements in service availability, with email queues significantly reduced and approaching normal levels," Microsoft said in an update.

The company warned that some users could still experience intermittent access problems or delayed email delivery while work continues to restore full functionality.

"We know our customers rely on our services to get important work done every day, and regret the impact these outages had on those who depend on us," the tech giant added.

Microsoft also repeated that it has found no evidence that the disruption was linked to malicious activity or a cyber attack.

The Government said it had been working with Microsoft and departments across Whitehall to assess the impact and activate contingency measures where required.

Minister for Cyber Liz Lloyd said: "The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport has been working with Microsoft and departments across Government to establish the full picture around the global outage at Microsoft and activate public sector contingency plans where needed."

She added that 999 services and NHS 111 had remained operational throughout the incident, while HMRC and Department for Work and Pensions phone lines continued to function, although callers could experience longer waiting times.

The fallout nevertheless extended across public services.

According to the BBC, staff at Westminster Magistrates' Court reported widespread delays because key systems were unavailable. One court worker said judges had struggled to access systems, prosecutors were unable to send documents electronically and staff had experienced difficulties obtaining pre-sentence reports.

A Ministry of Justice source told the broadcaster that courts remained operational but acknowledged that processes had become significantly more cumbersome while contingency arrangements were used.

The scale of the disruption has prompted fresh questions about whether key public bodies have become overly dependent on a small number of technology providers.

Tomás O'Leary, founder and chief executive of software company Origina, said the incident had exposed the extent to which essential services rely upon a single supplier.

"From the London Fire Brigade to schools, courts and NHS trusts, this outage showed how many of the capital's essential services rest on a single supplier in Microsoft," he said.

He warned that organisations should avoid treating the incident as an isolated event, noting that other major cloud providers have also suffered significant outages in recent years.

Professor Washington Ochieng, head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Imperial College London and director of the Centre for Active Resilience and Security, said the outage highlighted society's growing reliance on digital communications platforms.

He said services such as Outlook and Teams now underpin the functioning of much of modern life and argued that consideration should be given to treating them as critical national infrastructure.

Despite the widespread disruption, major UK airports including Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted reported no significant operational issues and flights continued to run largely as normal.

Microsoft said it would publish a full post-incident report, including the root cause of the outage and measures designed to prevent similar failures, once service restoration is complete.