A global Microsoft outage disrupted IndiGo’s email support services on Friday, although the airline said its other support channels remained available. Air India said its flight operations and communication channels were unaffected after temporarily rerouting emails.
IndiGo said in a post on X that the disruption meant it might not be able to receive emails from customers. The airline did not indicate that flight operations had been affected.
Air India said it was monitoring the Microsoft outage and had rerouted its emails to ensure that customer messages continued to reach the airline. It said responses would continue within its usual 24-hour timeline.
The disruption began late on Thursday night and affected Microsoft workplace platforms, including Outlook and Teams, across the world. In India, users began reporting problems on the outage-tracking platform Downdetector at around 11 pm on Thursday. Reports dipped overnight before rising again after 6 am on Friday.
Microsoft said the disruption was not caused by increased traffic. In a statement on X, the company attributed the incident to “a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable”. An update on Microsoft’s service health page at 11:16 am IST described the issue as “service degradation” affecting Microsoft 365 business and enterprise users.
The company said it was pursuing multiple workstreams to identify the underlying cause, address a traffic influx and recover backend servers. Microsoft also said it was not aware of any malicious activity causing the incident.
The incident has exposed the dependence of large passenger-facing organisations on cloud-based workplace and communication systems. For airlines, email is one part of a wider support network that includes websites, mobile applications, call centres and airport-facing operations. In this case, the two carriers reported different effects: IndiGo identified an interruption to email support, while Air India said its operational and communication channels remained functional.
The outage also illustrates how a failure in a global digital service can affect customer-facing systems in India without a corresponding disruption to physical transport infrastructure. The available statements did not indicate any impact on flight operations, airport services or passenger movement.
Microsoft said it would release a comprehensive post-incident report after the problem was resolved. Until then, the company’s service health updates and the airlines’ customer-service notices remain the principal information available on the disruption.
