Microsoft has begun gradually restoring services across affected infrastructure in the Asia Pacific region, but Outlook email and other Microsoft 365 functions remained disrupted for a second day on Friday, affecting business users and airline customer-support channels in India.
The company’s service health page continued to show “service degradation” for Microsoft 365 business, enterprise and consumer customers in an update issued at 4:30 pm IST. Microsoft said it was seeing improvements in mailbox access and delayed email processing, although some users could continue to face intermittent problems.
Microsoft said its teams had completed recovery actions across parts of the affected infrastructure and were extending those actions to other regions. The company’s immediate focus was on reducing email queues and backlogs, according to the update. “We regret the disruption today’s outage has caused for many of our customers. Our global teams continue to work with urgency to resolve the issue,” Puneet Chandok, President of Microsoft India and South Asia, said in a LinkedIn post.
Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s Executive Vice-President for Copilot, Agents and Platform, said on X that there was “no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity”. Microsoft’s status page also said it had no evidence of malicious activity associated with the incident. The company said it would publish a full post-incident report covering the root cause after mitigation was complete.
The disruption affected features that interact with Exchange Online and email, while services that do not depend on those functions remained operational. Users could be unable to access mailboxes through Outlook on the web and the Outlook desktop application, and delivery of emails could be delayed. On Teams, core functions including joining calls and meetings, group chats and channel messages were generally unaffected, although calendar-related tasks could fail.
The outage also exposed the dependence of customer-facing urban services on cloud-based communication systems. IndiGo said its email-support services were affected and that it might not be able to receive customer emails, while other support channels remained available. Akasa Air reported delays in its email-support services and directed passengers needing immediate assistance to its 24-hour care centre or social-media channels.
Air India said its flight operations were unaffected and that none of its communication channels had been disrupted. The airline said it had temporarily rerouted emails so messages could continue reaching it without interruption.
Indian users began reporting problems at around 11 pm on Thursday, according to outage tracker Downdetector. Reports moderated overnight before rising again after 6 am on Friday. Microsoft said the strain on its systems was not caused by an increase in traffic, but by “a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable”. The company’s next formal milestone is the completion of recovery actions and publication of its post-incident report.
