The Justice Minister today assured that the sector did not suffer any embarrassment despite the failure of emails caused by technical problems of Microsoft, which affected all citizens.
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13/11/2026
by
Lusa
A minister of Justice today assured that the sector did not suffer “any embarrassment” beyond the failure of emails due to technical problems of Microsoft, which affected all citizens, and said to ignore any security or data compromise.
“Nothing has failed, nothing has failed,” said Justice Minister Rita Alarcão Júdice, at the headquarters of the Judiciary Police in Lisbon, where the Conference on Reform of Administrative Justice and Taxation ended – the fastest, simplest and closest justice, organized by the Ministry of Justice and the Deputy Ministry and the State Reform.
At the beginning of the afternoon, at a time when Microsoft’s email services were beginning to return to normal in Europe, and just after the government had guaranteed the “normal functioning” of the executive and public administration, Rita Alarcão Júdice also ensured that it was “all settled” and that in the Justice sector there was no “any embarrassment” beyond the email failures that affected citizens in a general way.
Asked about the need for an employee from a county in the north of the country to have had to use personal email to circumvent the delay in communicating the outcome of an autopsy, the minister highlighted the proactivity in solving the problem, but said that the government is working to ensure that all the court communication is made through the Citius platform.
“ We are working on interoperability to avoid the exact use of the email,” he said.
You have yet to mention having no indication that Microsoft's failure may have affected more than email communication, namely the commitment of sensitive or personal data to citizens.
Microsoft 365 services for companies around the world have been failing since Thursday afternoon, which are hindering access to Outlook e-mail and OneDrive cloud service.
More than 70 countries, including Portugal, are affected by these failures in the services of the US company.
The source of the crisis lies in a failure of Exchange Online, the cloud email engine of the technology company, a failure that has spread in cascade to all services that depend on Exchange to consult mailboxes, calendars, permissions or shared files.