FROM Asia to the US, Microsoft’s outage involving services like Outlook and Teams has dragged on for hours and impacted many users, companies and some Government operations as the technology giant struggled to fix the issue. Microsoft said in an update on Friday that the outage was affecting a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online and email services. Services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were reported by users to be down. Air India said its flight operations were unaffected by the global Microsoft outage. However, it temporarily rerouted its email services to ensure customer queries continued to reach the airline without interruption, the company said in a statement. IndiGo, another Indian airline company, said it also reported disruptions to its email support services, which affected its ability to receive customer queries.

 

The airline in a statement on X said its other support channels remained operational and its flight operations were unaffected. The Redmond, Washington-based company said it was trying different ways to identify the cause of the problem and get its servers back online, using “a measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure”. The company said it did not have any indication that the outage was caused by malicious activity and would treat the incident “with urgency and priority until full resolution”. Over 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft said on its website. Roughly 1,30,000 users from dozens of countries Downdetector reported problems on outage tracker with accessing Outlook on Thursday although new reports have since fallen from that peak. A series of posts by the company on X suggested its engineers were struggling to get the problem fully under control. Hours after saying it managed to successfully restore service health and functionality, the company said it had updated its list of impacted services and was continuing to address the issue. Its most recent post offered little hope for users expecting a quick resolution. “We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” the company wrote. In a more recent update, Microsoft said “we’re seeing early stabilisation and capacity improvements as recovery actions continue”.