Microsoft said services affected by a continuing Microsoft 365 outage were being gradually restored across the Asia Pacific region on Friday, although Outlook email and other Exchange Online-dependent features remained disrupted for a second day, affecting business users and airline customer support services in India.
The company said it had completed recovery actions across parts of the affected infrastructure in Asia Pacific and was extending those actions to other regions. Microsoft reported improvements in mailbox access and delayed email processing, but warned that some users could continue to face intermittent problems.
Microsoft’s service health page continued to show “service degradation” for Microsoft 365 business and enterprise customers as well as consumer products in an update at 4:30 pm IST. The company said its teams were working to reduce email queues and backlogs created during the disruption.
“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, 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 found no evidence of malicious activity associated with the incident and would publish a full post-incident report containing the root cause after mitigation was complete.
The disruption had direct effects on some customer-facing services in India. IndiGo said its email support services were impacted and that it might not be able to receive customer emails. The airline said its other support channels remained available. Akasa Air also reported delays to email support and directed passengers needing immediate assistance to its 24/7 care centre or social-media channels.
Air India said its flight operations were unaffected and that there was no current impact on its communication channels. The airline said it had temporarily rerouted its emails so messages could continue reaching it without interruption.
According to Microsoft’s service information, features that interact with Exchange Online and email were affected, while functions that do not depend on those services remained operational. Users could be unable to access mailboxes through Outlook on the web and Outlook desktop, and email delivery could be delayed.
On Microsoft Teams, core functions including joining calls and meetings, group chats and channel messages were not affected in most cases. Calendar-related tasks, however, could fail because of their interaction with the affected email services.
Indian users began reporting problems at around 11 pm on Thursday, according to outage-tracking website 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 said its immediate work would focus on extending recovery measures, reducing outstanding email queues and completing mitigation before releasing its full post-incident report and root-cause findings.
