A National Pharmacy Association spokesperson said the outage was affecting pharmacies’ ability to communicate with GP practices and some patients, so “waits may be longer than normal and there may be delays to some prescriptions”.
The overall impact on health services remains unclear. Much of the NHS calendar is linked to diaries using the Microsoft system, but workflow practices differ between hospitals and trusts.
There are anecdotal reports of c-sections being cancelled and hospitals only accepting urgent referrals – though the impact on elective treatments has yet to be confirmed.
The GMB union’s national secretary Rachel Harrison said the outage was having a “serious impact” on ambulance and NHS trusts.
“Those who work in 111 and 999 services are unable to refer patient details in the normal way which is creating a massive backlog and has the potential for chaos,” she said, though “emergency and life-threatening call outs appear to be unaffected”.
Meanwhile, police forces in England and Wales – including the Metropolitan Police, Greater Manchester Police and Police Scotland – have said online forms may be affected. They are urging people to call them about any time-critical by non-emergency matters.
Downing Street said it was looking to get a “full picture” of the the extent of the outage’s effect on government services.
In England, the Local Government Association warned that some services may be disrupted but plans were in place to ensure people “continue to receive the support they need”.
Because the outage affects key organisational and communication platforms that are integrated, many other workplaces have been affected.
That has included schools, where teachers, office staff and parents have all had to navigate being unable to access key resources on calendars, emails and internal cloud servers.
One head teacher at a primary school near Newcastle said safeguarding systems had also been affected, meaning staff were having to report concerns in person instead of logging them, while another in Cheshire said his had been forced to delay sending out termly school reports.
Universities have also suffered disruption to online systems, including tools used to submit assignments.
Some, like the University of Portsmouth and University of Aberdeen, have extended deadlines or waived late submission penalties.
Elsewhere:
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Royal Mail said some of its online services were unavailable and email notifications about deliveries may be impacted, but post was still being collected and delivered as normal
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MPs have been unable to access their parliamentary accounts. A spokesperson said alternative arrangements were in place
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The Scottish government has activated its “resilience operations” as it assesses the impact of the outage
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MSPs also confirmed that Holyrood’s emails systems were down, meaning they were unable to communicate with constituents or access urgent casework
Some businesses are reverting to using paper or moving to different communication platforms like WhatsApp.
