Emergency and public services in Peterborough issue contact advice during global Microsoft outage
Staff at Peterborough City Hospital are urging patients to attend appointments as planned but to contact them by telephone due to the Microsoft outage affecting email services.
Emergency and public services in Peterborough have issued contact advice to the public after being hit by the global Microsoft outage.
Police and ambulance services say some of their online services are down and are urging the public to get in touch by telephone.
And the city council, city hospital, schools and the cathedral have reported issues with email services as a result of the global IT failure.
A spokesperson for police in Peterborough said: “Please be aware that due to the global Microsoft outage, our online reporting forms have been affected, and are currently offline.
You can still contact us at any time by: speaking to us on live web chat, or calling 101 if it's a non-emergency.
“Or calling us on 999 if it's an emergency
“Thank you for your patience and understanding.”
East Midlands Ambulance Services state: “We are experiencing an impact from the widespread global Microsoft outage.
“However, our 999 emergency service is not affected, and we are still able to respond to patients.
“Our Non-Emergency Patient Transport Service is also operating as normal but its phone lines are much busier than usual.
“If your call is not about a journey taking place today or tomorrow, please call back at a later point.
“Thank you for your understanding.
It adds: “During the Microsoft disruption, we are using our contingency plans so our colleagues can still communicate with each other and keep our service running.
“Please only call 999 in a life-threatening emergency. “
Staff at Peterborough City Hospital are urging patients should attend appointments as planned but anyone who needs to get in touch should do so by telephone.
The hospital has stated on social media: “We are currently being affected by the global Microsoft outage which is affecting access to emails today.
“All of our services continue to run as normal so please attend your appointments as usual.
“We will however experience delays in receiving and replying to email messages.
“If you do need to contact us then please call our switchboard on 01733 678000 and they will direct your call.”
Peterborough City Council says its email services have been hit and are advising members of the public seeking to get in touch to call by telephone or to wait until the crisis is resolved.
In a statement on social media, the council states: “Due to issues being experienced by Microsoft some council staff may not be able to access emails today.
“This is impacting our ability to communicate and respond to enquiries as usual.
“If you need to make contact with us and it is urgent please telephone instead. Please wait to contact us once the problem is fixed if you are able to.
“We will share further updates as soon as we are able to and let you know when services return to normal.
“Thank you for your understanding.”
Welbourne Primary Academy says while its schools are open, staff cannot access email services but phone lines are open.
The Microsoft crisis has also hit Peterborough Cathedral where staff say that its teams cannot access their emails and there will be delays in handling inquiries.
Microsoft has blamed a sever failure for the crises which began about 20 hours ago.