DUBLIN — A major global outage affecting Microsoft 365 services has entered its second day, causing widespread disruption across Irish healthcare facilities, GP surgeries, local authorities, and businesses.
The disruption, which began at approximately 6:00 PM Irish time on Thursday, November 12, has knocked out core platforms including Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Copilot for over 14 hours. Outage-monitoring platform Downdetector recorded nearly 130,000 user reports globally as the issue unfolded.
Impact on GP Surgeries and Prescriptions The outage has had an immediate knock-on effect on Ireland’s primary care network. Because Healthmail—the HSE’s secure clinical email system used by doctors to transmit electronic prescriptions directly to pharmacies—relies on Microsoft infrastructure, GP surgeries across the country have been unable to send digital scripts or electronic clinical communications.
As a result, practices have been forced to revert to manual workflows, printing and physically signing paper prescriptions for patients to bring directly to their local pharmacies until email servers are restored.
Hospitals and Public Bodies Affected Major healthcare institutions and local government bodies have also reported severe email disruptions on Friday morning:
- Mater Misericordiae University Hospital: The Dublin hospital issued an urgent public notice confirming that staff are currently unable to access emails due to the global Microsoft outage. Patients are advised to contact the hospital by phone rather than email, though scheduled appointments are proceeding as normal.
- Local Authorities: Several public agencies, including Mayo County Council, have warned residents that their email systems and email-reliant public services are temporarily offline.
Cause and Recovery Efforts Microsoft attributed the widespread failure to an "elevated load" and a surge in outbound call volume to its backend servers rather than a cyberattack. While engineers managed to bring several servers back online overnight, those servers crashed again under heavy traffic, forcing the tech giant to restrict connections and gradually rebalance traffic as it works toward a permanent fix.
Advice for Patients Patients requiring urgent prescriptions, medical certificates, or hospital updates today are advised to telephone their GP surgery or hospital department directly rather than sending emails, and to arrange for the collection of paper prescriptions where necessary.
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