Microsoft works to restore services after worldwide outage

A prolonged Microsoft outage disrupted businesses, airlines and government operations across several countries on Friday. Outlook, Teams and Copilot were among the affected services. Microsoft reported early signs of stabilisation, while recovery teams worked to restore normal service capacity

New Delhi: A prolonged Microsoft outage disrupted businesses, airlines and government operations across several countries on Friday, knocking out access to widely used services, including Outlook, Teams and its AI assistant Copilot, as the technology giant struggled to restore normal operations hours after the disruption began.

The US-headquartered tech giant said the incident affected multiple Microsoft 365 products connected to its Exchange Online and email infrastructure.

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Users across Asia and the United States reported difficulties accessing the services, with the disruption also affecting organisations that rely on Microsoft’s software for internal communication and customer support.

In its latest update, Microsoft said recovery efforts were ongoing across the affected infrastructure.

“We are seeing early signs of stabilisation, but service capacity has not yet returned to normal levels and health remains variable as traffic is carefully reintroduced,” the company said.

“Our primary mitigation path continues to focus on service stability and controlled recovery. Engineering teams are cycling affected infrastructure through traffic drain, restart, remediation, and staged return-to-service while monitoring closely. We are also evaluating additional mitigation options to improve recovery speed and consistency,” it added.

Microsoft said network and traffic-management actions remained in progress and that it continued to prioritise backlog and queue health to preserve delayed mail during recovery.

“As part of this effort, we are extending the email timeout window to 48 hours to help protect delayed messages while service recovery continues,” the company said.

It added that it was not aware of any malicious activity causing the incident and would share a full post-incident report, including the root cause and defence-in-depth measures, after recovery was complete.

The scale of the disruption was reflected in reports submitted to outage-tracking platform Downdetector for Copilot, Outlook and other Microsoft services.

The disruption also affected corporate schedules.

US-based industrial technology company Workhorse Group Inc. postponed its quarterly earnings conference call because of the outage.

Earlier in the day, domestic airlines, including IndiGo and Air India, also reported difficulties with their email systems, although flight operations remained unaffected.

Singapore’s Government Technology Agency confirmed that government email services were down and said it was working with Microsoft to resolve the problem.

In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said the country’s government IT infrastructure had also been affected and that authorities were “keeping a close eye on the developments”.

Japanese companies and institutions are turning to fax machines as the global Microsoft outage disrupts widely used services, including Outlook, Teams and Copilot, forcing employees to reschedule meetings and putting routine business operations on hold, according to reports.