Back Bbc Advice to patients in the West as Microsoft Outlook outage disrupts emails
Disruption to hospitals in the West of England is easing following a global Microsoft Outlook email outage .
Services including Teams, Outlook and AI software Copilot were impacted across the world, with Microsoft saying the cause was down to a "technical issue not related to cyber or AI/agents" . It apologised for the disruption.
Bristol NHS Foundation Trust reassured patients earlier that essential hospital services and procedures were continuing as normal and has now said that fixes have been put in place, allowing services to properly resume.
The trust also said "some emails may still be delayed while systems recover" and asked patients to call the relevant number on their appointment letter if they have urgent questions.
Gloucestershire NHS Foundation Trust also said normal service had resumed but there could be some delays as systems catch up.
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Bath and North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire (BSW) Community Health said its services were also continuing to operate under "tried and tested business continuity plans" earlier in the day.
"Please continue to use our services and attend appointments as planned unless we you otherwise.
"We are experiencing increased demand on our phone lines, and thank you for your patience and understanding," it added.
Somerset NHS Foundation Trust said it was unaffected by the outage and all of its services were running as normal, although there could be some delays to sending and receiving e-mails.
A spokesperson for NHS Dorset, NHS Somerset and NHS Bath and North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire ICBS cluster said they were experiencing some disruption to email services and local NHS services were enacting long-standing contingency plans to manage the situation.
NHS England said patients should continue to use 999 in an emergency, call 111, or attend their local pharmacy.
At 09:30, Microsoft said it was seeing "early signs of stabilisation" but service capacity had "not yet returned to normal levels".
In its latest update at 14:00, Microsoft said some users "may still experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as recovery continues".
It added that it was "restoring the remaining affected infrastructure while investigating residual service issues" to ensure sustained service stability.
The global outage started on Thursday, with monitoring website Downdetector seeing problems reported in more than 70 countries.
Microsoft executive Charles Lamanna said the issue was not caused by a cyber-security incident, ruling out any malicious or hacking activity.
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Gloucestershire NHS Foundation Trust
Bath and North East Somerset, Swindon and Wiltshire Community Health
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This article is one source in a clustered incident — the cluster page carries the summary, timeline and every other outlet covering it.
