Microsoft on Friday said it had completed recovery actions across parts of its affected infrastructure in the Asia Pacific region, including India, and was gradually restoring traffic, even as its Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook email, remained disrupted for a second day.
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 reporting issues around 11 pm on Thursday, according to outage tracker Downdetector. Reports moderated overnight before rising again on Friday morning.
The company's service health page continued to show "service degradation" affecting Microsoft 365 business and enterprise customers as well as consumer products, according to an update at 4.30 pm IST.
Microsoft said it was seeing improvements in mailbox access and delayed email processing, although some users might continue to experience intermittent issues.
Its focus was now on extending recovery actions to affected infrastructure in other regions and reducing email queues and backlogs, it said.
"We regret the disruption today's outage has caused for many of our customers. Our global teams continue to work with urgency to resolve the issue," Puneet Chandok, President, Microsoft India and South Asia, said in a post on LinkedIn.
The disruption 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.
Akasa Air also said its email support services were experiencing delays because of the disruption and asked passengers needing immediate assistance to contact its 24-hour care centre or reach out on social media.
Air India said its flight operations remained unaffected and there was currently no impact on any of its communication channels. The airline said it had temporarily rerouted its emails to ensure that messages continued to reach it without interruption.
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.
Meanwhile, Charles Lamanna, EVP of Copilot, Agents, and Platform at Microsoft, said in a post on X that there was "no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity".
The company's status page also said it had no evidence of malicious activity associated with the incident and that it would share a full post-incident report detailing the root cause after mitigation was complete.
According to Microsoft's status page, features of Microsoft 365 services that interact with Exchange Online and email were affected, while those that do not depend on them remained functional.
Users might be unable to access their mailboxes through Outlook on the web and Outlook desktop, while email delivery could be delayed, it said.
On Teams, most core functions, including joining calls and meetings, group chats and channel messages, were unaffected, but calendar-related tasks might fail.
Microsoft said on X that the strain on its systems was not caused by an increase in traffic but by "a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable".
(With inputs from PTI)
