Microsoft restores Outlook and 365 services after global outage; Indian airlines, financial firms report disruptions

NEW DELHI: Microsoft has restored its affected Microsoft 365 services following a global outage lasting more than 24 hours, which disrupted Outlook email access, Teams, Copilot and other workplace applications, affecting businesses and users across several countries, including India.

The disruption, which began late on November 12 in India, affected Microsoft’s Exchange Online infrastructure, leaving users unable to access mailboxes through Outlook’s web and desktop applications. Email delivery was delayed, while several applications dependent on Exchange Online experienced operational problems.

In India, the disruption affected email-based customer support operations at domestic airlines IndiGo, Air India and Akasa Air. The airlines reported difficulties receiving or responding to some passenger queries through email.

Air India temporarily rerouted its email services to ensure that customer communications continued to reach the airline. Flight operations were not reported to have been affected.

Financial services firms also faced difficulties accessing research reports and conducting client interactions, highlighting the dependence of business operations on cloud-based workplace services.

Microsoft traces disruption to network capacity upgrade

In its latest explanation, Microsoft attributed the incident to a problem during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a subsequent network change.

The company said the issue was technical and not related to a cyberattack or artificial intelligence agents.

The disruption affected Exchange Online, which powers organisational Outlook mailboxes, as well as services and features linked to email infrastructure. Users experienced problems with mailbox access, email delivery and certain calendar functions.

Microsoft Teams’ core messaging and online meeting functions remained largely operational, but features dependent on Exchange Online, including calendars and meeting scheduling, were affected.

Microsoft Copilot also experienced problems loading and accessing workplace information such as emails, calendars and files. SharePoint Online and other Microsoft 365 applications reported disruptions to dependent features.

Recovery completed, email backlog monitored

Microsoft said it had completed efforts to address the underlying issue and restored services to the remaining affected customers and regions on Saturday.

The company apologised for the disruption and said services were restored gradually, with recovery validated at each stage to ensure stability.

The outage also created a backlog of delayed email messages. Microsoft extended its email timeout window to 48 hours to help protect messages awaiting delivery while systems recovered and queues were cleared.

The company said it would continue monitoring the restored infrastructure and processing of accumulated email traffic. A detailed post-incident report is expected to provide further information on the cause and measures to prevent similar disruptions.

Outage exposes dependence on cloud-based workplace systems

The incident affected users in at least 72 to 74 countries and demonstrated how a disruption to a major cloud infrastructure provider can extend across email, collaboration, productivity and business applications.

For Indian organisations using Microsoft 365, the disruption highlighted the operational risks of depending on a single technology ecosystem for business-critical communication.

The experience also underlines the importance of business continuity arrangements, including alternative customer communication channels, backup procedures and contingency plans for critical digital services.