A UK government digital appeals service will stay offline until Monday 16 November after a worldwide Microsoft outage knocked out email and online submissions, according to a gov.uk status page updated on Friday 13 November.
What happened
The page says the service first ran into trouble at 12:01 on Friday, when the department reported it was “currently experiencing problems sending and receiving emails due to the worldwide Microsoft outage”, adding that the disruption was “affecting all services”. The digital appeals system was paused for customers and new submissions as a result.
By 17:00 the same day, officials confirmed the service was still affected and said they had decided to keep new submissions paused “over the weekend” rather than risk bringing it back up only for it to fail again. The update states plainly: “To guarantee the security and stability of the digital appeals service for customers, we have decided to keep new submissions paused over the weekend.”
Who is affected
Anyone trying to lodge a new appeal through the service cannot do so until it returns. The page is explicit that this is a pause on new submissions, not a cancellation, and that the department intends “to have the service back up and running safely on Monday 16 November”. It says it will update the page once that happens.
For people with an appeal deadline that falls during the outage, the advice is to contact their case team directly for support, with the department saying it “will support” affected customers rather than penalise them for missing a deadline caused by the outage.
Importantly, the disruption has not spread everywhere. The gov.uk page says arranged site visits, hearings and inquiries were expected to continue as normal despite the email problems. It also confirms that the national infrastructure and crown applications websites remained online and working as normal throughout, and that the customer web form and phone lines were still working for urgent queries.
What the document actually says in plain terms
Stripped of jargon, the two updates amount to this: Microsoft’s outage broke the department’s email systems and, with them, the online appeals portal. Rather than patch it back together for the weekend, officials chose to leave it switched off for new business until Monday, while keeping phones, a web contact form and in-person casework running. Anyone with a looming deadline is told to pick up the phone or email their case handler rather than wait for the portal to reopen.
What to watch next
The key date is Monday 16 November, when the department says the appeals service is due to resume. Daily Tech Times will be watching gov.uk for confirmation it has actually returned, and for any wider UK government or Microsoft statement on the scale and cause of the outage that forced the pause in the first place.