Microsoft says global Outlook and Teams outage is over after more than a day; IndiGo, Akasa Air and Indian IT firms were hit

Microsoft said on Saturday that it had fixed the fault behind its global email outage, bringing Outlook, Teams features, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services back after disruption that began on Thursday, November 12, and ran for more than 24 hours. In a post on X, the company said it had addressed the underlying issue and “restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions”.

The outage reached more than 70 countries. Companies, government offices and ordinary users lost email and calendars first, then access to Copilot, SharePoint and sign-in services tied to Exchange Online, Microsoft’s cloud email system. Applications not linked to Exchange kept working, and Teams chat and online meetings largely held up while scheduling did not.

How it hit India

Indian users began reporting problems at about 11 pm on Thursday, according to Downdetector data, and complaints rose again on Friday morning as the working day started. By 4:30 pm IST on Friday, Microsoft’s service dashboard still showed degraded service across business, enterprise and consumer products.

IndiGo said its email support was disrupted and that it might not receive some customer emails, pointing passengers with urgent needs to its website, app and virtual assistant 6E Skai. Akasa Air warned of delayed email replies and asked passengers to use its 24-hour customer care centre or social media. Air India said its flights ran normally and that it had temporarily rerouted email so messages kept flowing. ICICI Lombard’s email support was also affected for a time.

Inside offices, the effect was slower and quieter. Tata Motors moved its second-quarter results media call from Teams to Zoom. Employees at Infosys, EY, Accenture, ABB and HPE reported unstable connections, with Outlook slow for some and Teams working for others. Cognizant described an “ongoing global outage” affecting Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Copilot and single sign-on, and an Infosys alert listed Exchange Online, Copilot and SharePoint as down. At Kyndryl in Bengaluru, notifications arrived but messages took far longer to reach inboxes. One consultancy that runs on Zoho and Google Workspace reported no impact.

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, adding that Microsoft’s global teams were working urgently on a fix.

What went wrong

According to Microsoft, the cause was a network fault, not a cyberattack. A flaw introduced during an earlier upgrade of network capacity surfaced after a later network change. Email servers began failing automated health checks and went offline, and their load shifted to the remaining servers, which then failed too. The company said the strain did not come from a surge in users and that artificial intelligence agents were not involved.

Charles Lamanna, who runs the Microsoft division that includes Outlook and Teams, said there was “no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity”. Australia’s Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft did not suspect an attack and described a faulty update that “has gone awry”.

Microsoft paused software updates, shifted traffic away from struggling equipment and rebooted servers on Thursday, but these steps did not fully work. It then restored services in stages, checking each one before moving on. Because mail was queued, it extended its email holding window to 48 hours so delayed messages are not lost; mail sent on Thursday and Friday may still arrive over the weekend, and Teams meetings that fell during the outage may need to be rescheduled.

The size of the damage

Downdetector, run by Ookla, logged more than 7.4 million reports worldwide, peaking near 20,000 a minute, over 1,500 times normal levels. Microsoft’s products are used by as many as 430 million people, so the true count is far higher. Anderson Economic Group put lost productivity at about $7 billion, a rough estimate, while Morningstar DBRS estimated global insured losses at $300 million to $500 million, below the $400 million to $1.5 billion it put on the 2024 CrowdStrike outage. Microsoft shares closed flat at $523.88 on Friday.

Government services were hit abroad: agencies in Australia, Japan and the US, and in Britain the National Health Service and the Metropolitan Police. Euronext, Maersk, Aviva and other firms reported email disruption or delayed results, and AI firms said their Microsoft 365 connectors had problems that were later resolved.

Why it matters

This was one of the longest outages in Microsoft’s history and its second serious disruption this year, after one in January. Luke Kehoe of Ookla said it shows “how much of the working day now runs through one provider’s email and collaboration tools”.

Indian experts drew the same lesson. Sachin Panicker, chief AI officer at Fulcrum Digital, said such outages show how much of the modern enterprise sits on “a handful of shared platforms” and urged firms to map their dependencies and keep alternatives. Amit Singh of WeP Solutions noted that Indian companies have improved disaster recovery for data and infrastructure but still overlook communication continuity, because identity, domains and security policies make a backup email system hard to set up. Sambratha Shetty of the Synergia Foundation said India should ensure that “no single external provider becomes indispensable” to its critical institutions.

What happens next

Microsoft is still monitoring its systems and clearing the backlog of email. It has apologised to customers and promised a full post-incident report once its review is complete, but has not given a date. Until then, companies that went quiet for a day, from airline help desks to listed-company results calls, will be asking how much of their workday should depend on a single mailbox provider.