Outlook down again: Microsoft 365 outage drags into Day 2, hits IndiGo, Air India and Akasa Air
PTC Web Desk: A major Microsoft outage has left users around the world unable to reach their email and workplace tools. India, Australia, Japan and the US are among the affected countries. Companies, schools and government offices all reported trouble with daily work.
Several Microsoft 365 services have been shaky since November 12. These include Outlook, Teams, Copilot, SharePoint Online and OneDrive. The problems persist as of Saturday, even though Microsoft’s teams had been working to bring things back.
Airlines feel the pinch
Indian carriers were among the businesses caught out. IndiGo, Air India and Akasa Air said their email-based customer support was disrupted. That made it harder for them to receive or answer some passenger queries.
Air India said it temporarily rerouted its email services so customer messages would still reach the airline. Flight operations were not reported to be affected. SpiceJet separately warned that its customer care helplines were facing patchy connectivity. It later said they were working normally again.
Microsoft said it had finished recovery work on parts of its affected infrastructure in the Asia Pacific region and network traffic was coming back gradually. Outlook, however, kept acting up for a second straight day.
Downdetector showed close to 1.3 lakh users reporting Outlook problems soon after 1 pm local time. The count later fell, but many people still said they could not send or receive mail or that their inboxes would not load. Microsoft says more than 43 crore people use its 365 apps, so even a partial failure affects a very large number of users.
The company’s service health dashboard first flagged the issue at 11:16 am IST on Friday. At 4:30 pm IST it was still showing a “service degradation” warning for business, enterprise and consumer users.
Cause still being traced
Microsoft said its engineers were working on several fronts. They were trying to find the root cause of an unusual surge in traffic, bring backend servers back online and stabilise the systems involved.
The company’s posts on X suggested the fix was not going smoothly. Hours after saying service health had been restored, it updated its list of affected services and said work was continuing.
Puneet Chandok, president of Microsoft India and South Asia, apologised in a LinkedIn post. “We regret the disruption today’s outage has caused for many of our customers,” he wrote. He added that Microsoft’s global teams were working urgently to resolve it.
- PTC NEWS
