The Microsoft outage disrupted email-based customer support at IndiGo, Air India and Akasa Air on Friday, affecting passenger communications and business services in India, while Microsoft worked to restore its cloud infrastructure across regions. Flight operations were not reported to have been affected, but delayed or inaccessible email services disrupted routine customer and workplace functions.
IndiGo said its email support services had been impacted and that it might not be able to receive customer emails. The airline said other customer support channels remained available. Akasa Air reported delays in its email support services and advised passengers needing immediate assistance to use its 24-hour customer care centre or contact the airline through social media.
Air India said it had temporarily rerouted its email services to ensure customer communications continued reaching the airline. The carrier said its flight operations remained unaffected and that there was no disruption to its communication channels.
The disruption also affected financial services firms, which reported difficulties accessing research reports and conducting client interactions. Government agencies, healthcare providers and technology companies in dozens of countries were also affected, according to the report. The incident extended across Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Copilot, Planner, To Do, Power BI, Defender, Intune and Purview.
Microsoft said it had completed recovery actions across parts of its affected infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific region and was gradually restoring traffic. The company reported improvements in mailbox access and delayed email processing, but cautioned that some users could continue to experience intermittent problems. Its immediate focus was to apply recovery measures in other regions and clear accumulated email queues and backlogs.
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. Puneet Chandok, President of Microsoft India and South Asia, said in a LinkedIn post that the company regretted the disruption and that its global teams were working to resolve the issue.
Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s Executive Vice President of Copilot, Agents and Platform, said there was no indication that the outage resulted from malicious or cyber activity. Microsoft’s service status page also said it had found no evidence of malicious activity associated with the incident.
The disruption primarily affected Microsoft 365 features that interact with Exchange Online, Microsoft’s cloud-based email platform. Users could be unable to access mailboxes through Outlook’s web and desktop applications, while email delivery and processing could be delayed. Most core Teams functions, including joining calls and meetings, group chats and channel messages, remained operational, although calendar-related tasks could fail because of their dependence on 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. At its peak, the outage generated more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems, with disruptions reported across 72 to 74 countries.
Microsoft said the disruption was not caused by an unusual surge in traffic but by “a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable”. The company has been rebuilding affected servers, adjusting configurations and managing traffic as it works to restore normal service. It said it would publish a detailed post-incident report, including the root cause, after mitigation measures are complete.
