Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:

To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, whether (a) Government services and (b) critical national infrastructure faced disruption as a result of the Microsoft Azure outage on Wednesday 29 October 2025; and what estimate her Department has made of the cost to the economy of that service outage.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) is leading Government’s response to the Microsoft Azure outage that took place on Wednesday 29 October 2025. We understand that all Azure services were restored on Wednesday evening, and DSIT is in contact with Microsoft to understand how such events can be mitigated in the future.

DSIT has identified disruption to online Government services across several departments, which were restored within hours of the incident.

We are not aware of any major disruption arising from this event affecting Critical National Infrastructure but will continue to work with relevant operators to understand the full impact.

The outage affected a wide range of organisations across all sectors and it will take some time to fully understand the scale of the economic impact.