Microsoft has said services are being “gradually restored” after a major global outage that saw police forces, the NHS, businesses and schools among those impacted amid one of the worst IT failures for years.

The UK Government and its counterparts worldwide have been forced to put in place contingency measures due to the outage, which has seen Microsoft scramble to restore email, Teams and other services since they went down yesterday around 6pm.

In its latest update, Microsoft said services were “being gradually restored”, with users seeing some email services beginning to come back.

The tech giant said while improvements were being made to email access, “some users may continue to experience intermittent issues”.

It stressed it was working with “urgency” to find a full fix for the issue, which has caused widespread disruption since late Thursday.

On its Microsoft 365 status page, the firm said: “Traffic is being gradually restored, and we’re seeing improvements in key customer scenarios, including mailbox access and delayed email processing.

“Reducing email queues and backlogs remains a priority, and the extended 48-hour email timeout window remains in place to help protect delayed messages as delivery catches up.”

In an update, the company said it is seeing “sustained improvements” in service availability, but warned some users may still experience intermittent connectivity problems or delayed email delivery.

Microsoft executive vice-president Charles Lamanna said in a statement on Friday afternoon: “We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure.

“We know our customers rely on our services to get important work done every day, and regret the impact these outages had on those who depend on us.

“Our teams are reviewing what happened and how we can prevent similar issues going forward.”

Monitoring website Downdetector first showed a spike in users reporting problems with Microsoft Teams in the UK at about 6.15pm on Thursday, with more than 130,000 reporting Outlook issues in the US at its peak last night.

Millions of its customers have been unable to send and receive emails through Outlook, with Teams has also been affected for many, and the tech giant’s Copilot AI assistant and other Microsoft 365 services are also disrupted.

Other AI chat services have also been disrupted, such as OpenAI’s Chat GPT and Anthropic’s Claude.

Mr Lamanna said the outages did not appear to be the result of a cyber attack.

Police forces have said they are unable to receive crime reports online and are urging people to call either 101 or 999 to make any urgent reports.

NHS England said health service staff are “enacting long-standing measures” to overcome IT outages, including using paper records, but asked patients to continue contacting services such as 999 and 111 as necessary, and attend appointments as usual.

The National Pharmacy Association said there may be delays to some NHS patients getting their prescriptions, as the outage is affecting NHS email systems.

Councils have also said some services are being impacted, while National Rail said the outage may be affecting customers’ ability to access their train tickets via email.

Microsoft previously said it was seeing “positive results” from a patch put in place to fix the issue.

The group stressed it had “no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident”.

It added: “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 recovery is complete.”

Users from 74 countries reported issues with Microsoft services in the space of an hour on Thursday, according to Downdetector, with reports about Outlook peaking at more than 2,000 times their normal level.

Tina McKenzie, national chair of the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), said businesses would be left “floundering by this mass outage”.

She added: “We’re calling on small businesses’ clients to be patient and understanding at this tricky moment, falling on Friday 13th of all days.

“Small firms should also be aware that criminals and fraudsters may try to take advantage of them with fake offers of ‘help’.”