Microsoft's workplace services, including Outlook, Teams and Copilot, continued to face disruptions in India on Friday, a day after a global outage began, with users reporting a fresh spike in problems after 6 am.
Indian users began flagging issues around 11 pm on Thursday, according to outage tracker Downdetector. Reports moderated overnight before rising again on Friday morning.
Microsoft's service health page showed "service degradation" affecting Microsoft 365 business and enterprise customers as well as consumer products, as of an update at 11.16 am IST.
The company said it was pursuing multiple workstreams to identify the underlying cause and restore its backend servers. It added that it was not aware of any malicious activity behind the incident and would share details of the root cause in a post-incident report once the disruption was mitigated.
Microsoft said the strain on its systems was not due to increased traffic but because "a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable".
Users may be unable to access their mailboxes through Outlook on the web and desktop applications, while email delivery could be delayed. Microsoft 365 features that depend on Exchange Online and email have been affected, though services that do not rely on them remain functional.
Copilot Chat users may also face problems loading the service or receiving responses. Its integration with workplace data, including emails, calendars and files, may be affected.
On Teams, core functions such as joining calls and meetings, group chats and channel messages remain largely unaffected. However, calendar-related tasks, including scheduling and viewing meetings, may fail, Microsoft said.
The disruption has also affected businesses in India. Airline IndiGo said its email support services were impacted and it might not be able to receive customer emails. The airline said its other support channels remained available and asked customers requiring urgent assistance to contact its virtual assistant, 6E Skai, through its website or mobile app.
The outage began on Thursday and affected Microsoft 365 services across several countries. Nearly 130,000 users reported Outlook problems on Downdetector at the peak of the disruption, which spread to 74 countries and territories within an hour. Microsoft had earlier reported limited recovery after attempting to redirect traffic away from affected servers, but did not provide a timeline for full restoration.
(With inputs from PTI)
