Scottish Government spent £6.5m on Microsoft 365 licences
The Scottish Government has also had to convene its resilience room as a global Microsoft outage hits.
The Scottish Government spends millions of pounds a year on Microsoft services such as Outlook and Teams.
According to the previous SNP government, the government spent over £6.5 million on Microsoft 365 in 2024/25.
This comes as thousands of Scots grapple with the impact of a global Microsoft outage, impacting the likes of Police Scotland and several local authorities.
The Scottish Government has also had to convene its emergency response team to deal with the fall out of the outage.
According to a parliamentary question asked by the now presiding officer Kenny Gibson back in June 2025, the government spent £6,514,529.39 on Microsoft 365 licences.
Ivan McKee, the then public finance minister, said: “The Scottish Government spent a total of £6,514,529.39 on Microsoft 365 licences in the most recent financial year, through the Microsoft Enterprise Agreement.
“This figure includes all licences held under the SCOTS Connect tenancy, which supports both Scottish Government core and non-core customers.”
Justice Secretary Neil Gray says he has activated the government’s resilience operations to deal with the global outage.
He said: “The Scottish Government’s resilience operation has been activated to assess the main impacts on Scotland of the global outage impacting some of Microsoft’s cloud services.”
He added: “We are liaising with partners across public services as they assess the impacts and continue providing key frontline services.
“While this is currently impacting some of the Scottish Government’s corporate systems, including access to emails, the Scottish Government remains operational and business continues.”
The outage on Friday is affecting Microsoft 365 services such as Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive and Copilot.
Microsoft said its infrastructure came under strain because numerous servers had become unavailable. This resulted in an “elevated load” on its servers.
Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s vice-president of platforms, said there was “no indication” the problems were caused by “malicious” activity.
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