Law firms worldwide are dealing with a global Microsoft outage that started on Thursday, November 12, and was still affecting email systems on Friday. The outage has caused emails to stop working and other related applications to fail, impacting client communications and court filings.
The legal industry’s reliance on Microsoft for communications and workflow tools has been highlighted by the outage. 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 have 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.
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With email down, some lawyers 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.”
Microsoft did not disclose the cause of the outage but stated there was no evidence of a cyber attack. The company said it 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.”
The incident is not the first time firms have had to deal with IT outages in recent years. 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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