Law firms around the world are still responding to a global Microsoft outage that has caused emails to seize up and other related applications to stop working, impacting client communications and court filings.
The outage – which started on Thursday (12 November) and was still affecting email systems on Friday – underscored how reliant the legal industry is on Microsoft for communications and other workflow tools.
The BBC reported that the outage has caused court delays, with judges unable to access systems and courts unable to receive documents such as pre-sentence reports.
Some law firms posted messages on their websites outlining their contingency measures. Linklaters said its teams were working as normal and the firm had arrangements in place to keep client matters moving and meet time-critical deadlines today and over the weekend.
With email down, some lawyers also turned to LinkedIn to reach out to clients. Richard East, senior partner at Quinn Emanuel, wrote: “Message to clients/opposing solicitors: we are presently not able to receive or send any emails, as a consequence of the global Microsoft issues.”
Others poked fun at the situation. One lawyer quipped: “Who knew that a Microsoft outage would feel like a professional existential crisis.” Another joked that it was “the first free time [lawyers have] had on their hands since 98”.
Microsoft did not say what caused the outage, but said there was no evidence of a cyber attack. On Friday morning, the BBC reported that the tech giant was working to restore services to normal levels, with email queues significantly reduced.
In an update, Microsoft said: “We’re closely monitoring service health and validating recovery across affected connection methods to ensure sustained service stability.
“At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident. We will continue to treat this with urgency until full mitigation, and we will share a full post-incident report with root cause and defence-in-depth actions after mitigation is complete.”
It is not the first time firms have had to deal with IT outages in recent years. Back in 2024, a faulty update to cybersecurity company CrowdStrike’s software impacted around 8.5 million Windows devices, though law firms emerged relatively unscathed by that incident.
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