Scottish Parliament’s voting suspended after Microsoft outage 

MSPs went home earlier than planned after a “significant Microsoft outage” suspended all voting in the Scottish Parliament. 

Politicians had gathered in the afternoon to vote on over 400 amendments to the Land Reform Bill, but voting was suspended at 4:30pm after just half an hour of activity.  

“There is, I understand, a significant Microsoft outage affecting some products, and it is global, and that is preventing us from voting,” said Alison Johnstone, the presiding officer.  

On X (formerly known as Twitter), the Scottish Parliament tweeted that the evening’s business was “suspended until 7pm, due to an ongoing global IT outage that has affected Parliament's voting system.” 

The parliament uses an electronic voting system which allows members to vote from their desks. In the Holyrood chamber, each desk has a small screen built in where MSPs can request to speak in debates and vote at the end of them. After inserting their parliament pass into the system, MSPs can press a Yes, No or Abstain button to vote.

Later in the afternoon Johnstone made another statement to the parliament, calling off all business for the day. 

“We have concluded that we should not resume this evening for both technical and procedural reasons,” said Johnstone. “Therefore, I am postponing the rest of today’s business. The [parliamentary] 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.” 

The outage, which is similar to the Amazon Web Services outage that affected thousands of businesses last week, impacted the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform. By 9pm, Microsoft confirmed that its services were back up and running, but by that time MSPs had gone home. 

The problem was caused by an issue within the Domain Name System (DNS) that operates as a virtual phonebook for the internet. An inadvertent change to this system within the Azure cloud left internet users locked out of applications and unable to access websites.  

The online outage tracker Downdetector reported thousands of issues with a range of websites worldwide as the outage progressed. Users reported issues with Microsoft’s own 365 software, home to popular apps like Word and PowerPoint, along with banking and supermarket apps.  

“Our protection mechanisms, to validate and block any erroneous deployments, failed due to a software defect which allowed the deployment to bypass safety validations,” Microsoft Azure wrote in a post updating users on the outage. “Safeguards have since been reviewed and additional validation and rollback controls have been immediately implemented to prevent similar issues in the future.” 

Parliamentary business resumed today, with First Minister’s Questions and a variety of committee meetings and debates scheduled to go ahead as planned.