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.
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 from before issues arose just before 4.30pm. Parliament was set to vote on amendments until around 10pm on Wednesday night.
Alison Johnstone, the Presiding Officer, said she would update the chamber at 7pm.
She told MSPs: “There is, it appears I understand, a significant Microsoft outage affecting some products, and it is global, and that is preventing us from voting.”
She said the Parliamentary Bureau had met and agreed to suspend voting before updating Holyrood at 7pm “with a view to resuming business” then.
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.”
