New Delhi: A global Microsoft outage has disrupted businesses and government operations across several countries, from Asia to the United States, with users reporting problems accessing Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services.
Microsoft said the disruption was affecting a wide range of Microsoft 365 services connected to Exchange Online and its email infrastructure. The company has been working to restore affected servers, but its latest updates indicate that the recovery remains incomplete.
In India, Air India said its flight operations were unaffected by the outage. The airline temporarily rerouted its email services to ensure customer queries continued to reach it without interruption.
IndiGo also reported disruptions to its email support services, affecting its ability to receive customer queries. However, the airline said its other support channels remained operational and its flight operations were unaffected.
The Redmond-based technology company said it was taking a measured approach to identifying the cause of the disruption and repairing affected infrastructure. It added that it had no indication that the outage was caused by malicious activity and was treating the incident with urgency.
A series of updates on Microsoft's official X account suggested that engineers were still working to bring the disruption under control. After initially reporting improvements in service health and functionality, the company updated its list of affected services and continued investigating the issue.
In one update, Microsoft said changes applied to improve serviceability were not producing the expected results.
A subsequent update offered some indication of progress, with the company reporting early signs of stabilisation and improvements in capacity as recovery efforts continued. However, it did not announce a timeline for the full restoration of services.
More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 applications, according to the company's website. Downdetector recorded reports from around 130,000 users across several countries experiencing problems accessing Outlook on Thursday, although the number of reports later declined.
The disruption also affected organisations across Asia, Australia and the United States.
US-based industrial technology company Workhorse Group Inc. postponed a conference call on its quarterly earnings because of the outage.
In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft had drawn a comparison between the disruption and the global CrowdStrike outage in 2024. Burke said he had spoken to Microsoft's senior executive in Australia and the government's national cybersecurity coordinator about the incident.
"They don't believe they are dealing with a cyberattack. They believe that they are dealing in some ways with something similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike, where there is an update that has gone awry," Burke told reporters in Sydney.
The July 2024 CrowdStrike incident disrupted flights, hospitals, banks and retailers worldwide after a faulty software update affected computers running Microsoft Windows.
In Hong Kong, businessperson Danny Lau, who runs an aluminium company, said his firm's Outlook accounts were unable to receive updates from customers in the United States. He warned that a prolonged disruption could affect production timelines. Some banks in the city also reported disruption to parts of their operations.
Singapore's Government Technology Agency said government email services were down and that it was working with Microsoft to resolve the issue.
The Philippines' Supreme Court said the ongoing Microsoft 365 outage had affected some of its operations, including email responses.
In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said the disruption had affected government IT infrastructure. Authorities were monitoring developments and had secured alternative communication channels, including telephone services.
The outage also affected other technology companies. OpenAI and Anthropic reported problems connecting with Microsoft 365 tools, highlighting the wider impact of disruptions to cloud-based services used by businesses and artificial intelligence platforms.
Microsoft has not provided a timeline for full recovery.
(With inputs from PTI and media reports)