Scottish Parliament suspends all voting over Microsoft outage

Voting has been suspended at the Scottish Parliament following a “significant Microsoft outage”.

Holyrood’s Presiding Officer said technical issues meant MSPs were unable to vote on Wednesday evening.

The Downdetector website has reported significant spikes in outages impacting the Royal Bank of Scotland, BT and Asda.

It also reported thousands of issues with Xbox, Minecraft and Azure – all owned by Microsoft. Heathrow is also reportedly experiencing issues.

Politicians at the Scottish Parliament were taking part in the second of two marathon sessions to vote on nearly 400 amendments to the Land Reform Bill.

MSPs had been only been debating changes to the legislation for around half an hour before issues arose just before 4.30pm.

Alison Johnstone, the Presiding Officer, said she had hoped proceedings would continue at 7pm but later said all voting for the day would be scrapped amid continued issues.

Further updates are expected on Thursday.

She told MSPs: “There is, I understand, a significant Microsoft outage affecting some products, and it is global, and that is preventing us from voting.”

She later added: “The Bureau has considered all options as to whether we can continue stage three proceedings this evening and in considering options we are very mindful of the fact that we are passing legislation.

“We have concluded that we should not resume this evening for both technical and procedural reasons.

“Therefore I am postponing the rest of today’s business.

“The Bureau will continue to meet and further information will be provided as soon as possible but I am postponing the rest of today’s business and closing this meeting.”

Microsoft has said it is investigating the issue, which it warned could also impact Outlook and Teams.

A spokesperson for the company said: “We are working to address an issue affecting Azure Front Door that is impacting the availability of some services.

“Customers should continue to check their Service Health Alerts and the latest update on this issue can be found on the Azure status page.”