A widespread disruption to Microsoft's cloud services hit Indian airlines, financial services firms, and businesses
NEW DELHI — A widespread disruption to Microsoft's cloud services hit Indian airlines, financial services firms, and businesses on Friday, while affecting government agencies, healthcare providers and technology companies across dozens of countries.
Domestic airlines IndiGo, Air India and Akasa Air reported disruptions to email-based customer support, affecting their ability to receive or respond to some passenger queries. Air India temporarily rerouted email services to ensure customer communications continued reaching the airline, while flight operations were not reported to have been affected.
Financial services firms also faced difficulties accessing research reports and conducting client interactions.
IndiGo said its email support services had been impacted and that it might not be able to receive customer emails. All other customer support channels remained available, the airline said in a post on X.
Akasa Air also reported delays in its email support services, advising passengers requiring immediate assistance to contact its 24-hour customer care centre or reach out through social media.
Air India, however, said its flight operations remained unaffected and there was no disruption to its communication channels. The airline said it had temporarily rerouted its emails to ensure messages continued to reach it without interruption.
The disruptions come amid a wider outage affecting Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook email, which has affected users and businesses across regions.
Microsoft said on Friday it had completed recovery actions across parts of its affected infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific region and was gradually restoring traffic. It reported improvements in mailbox access and delayed email processing but cautioned that some users could continue to experience intermittent problems.
The company's immediate focus is on extending recovery measures to affected infrastructure in other regions and clearing accumulated email queues and backlogs, it said.
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.
Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's Executive Vice President of Copilot, Agents and Platform, said there was "no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity".
Microsoft's service status page also said it had found no evidence of malicious activity associated with the incident. The company said it would publish a detailed post-incident report, including the root cause, after mitigation measures are complete.
The disruption has primarily affected Microsoft 365 features that interact with Exchange Online, the company's cloud-based email platform. Users may be unable to access mailboxes through Outlook on the web and desktop applications, while email delivery and processing could be delayed.
On Microsoft Teams, most core functions, including joining calls and meetings, group chats and channel messages, have remained operational. Calendar-related tasks, however, may fail because of their dependence on 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 had earlier said the disruption was caused not by an unusual surge in traffic but by "a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable", pointing to infrastructure availability rather than an increase in demand as the source of the problem.
The outage underscores the growing dependence of businesses on cloud-based productivity and communications platforms, where disruption to a core service such as email can affect customer support and internal operations even when other digital services continue functioning.
With recovery still under way across regions, Microsoft's immediate challenge is to restore consistent access, clear delayed messages and establish the precise cause of the infrastructure failure.
The disruption has extended well beyond India, with companies and institutions from the United States to Taiwan and Australia reporting disruptions.
The disruption affected a range of Microsoft products and services, including Outlook, Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Copilot, Planner, To Do, Power BI, Defender, Intune and Purview. The problems have ranged from inaccessible email accounts and disrupted collaboration tools to difficulties with cloud-based file access, security management and workplace applications.
At its peak, the outage generated more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems on Downdetector, with disruptions reported across 72-74 countries.
Microsoft's investigation has pointed to technical problems involving the infrastructure supporting its Exchange Online services. Several servers became unexpectedly unavailable, while difficulties establishing secure connections further complicated recovery. The resulting concentration of traffic on remaining servers added to the strain, making restoration more difficult.
Microsoft has been working to rebuild affected servers, adjust configurations and manage traffic as it attempts to restore normal service. The company has said it has not identified any malicious activity as the cause of the incident.