Microsoft outage: From flight cancellations to govt disruptions, how bad is the impact?
Microsoft's recovery efforts have hit repeated setbacks, with servers becoming unresponsive under renewed traffic, prolonging disruptions across its cloud-based services
The global Microsoft outage has disrupted far more than workplace emails, affecting airline operations in India, government departments across several countries and even third-party AI services such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Beginning on Thursday (November 12) and continuing into Friday (November 13), the disruption has left thousands of users struggling to access Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 applications.
Airlines report cancellations, delays
According to an NDTV report, SpiceJet cancelled three flights departing from Delhi on Friday, bound for Pune, Leh and Mumbai. Two other flights, to Darbhanga and Mumbai, were delayed.
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IndiGo said its email support services had been affected and that it might not be able to receive customer emails. The airline directed passengers to alternative support channels, including its virtual assistant, 6E Skai. Air India, meanwhile, said its flight operations remained unaffected but that it had temporarily rerouted email traffic to ensure passenger communications continued.
Govt operations hit across countries
The disruption also affected government operations in several countries. Japan's Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki confirmed that the outage had affected the government's IT infrastructure.
In Australia, the country's spy agency and federal police were among the organisations affected, Reuters reported. Australia's Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke said the disruption was concentrated largely around email systems.
The US House of Representatives also confirmed that its users had been affected and said its engineers were working with Microsoft to address the problem.
Outage spreads to third-party services
The outage extended beyond Microsoft's own applications, affecting third-party services that depend on its infrastructure. OpenAI reported problems with its Microsoft 365 connectors, with new connections potentially failing and existing tools experiencing disruptions. Anthropic also identified an issue involving an upstream provider that affected its Microsoft 365 connector, Reuters reported.
Public-facing services in Australia also experienced difficulties. According to a BBC report, Service NSW urged customers to delay visits to government service centres, while some hospitals and healthcare institutions reported clerical problems.
Microsoft has been attempting to restore the affected servers and manage traffic across its infrastructure. However, the company acknowledged that its latest recovery measures were not producing the expected results.
Why is outage taking so long to fix?
Microsoft's recovery efforts have encountered a recurring problem. The servers brought back online have, in some instances, become unresponsive again when traffic was redirected to them.
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This has created a difficult cycle in which restoring server capacity has not necessarily translated into a solution. As traffic returns to the affected machines, some become unresponsive, putting additional pressure on the remaining infrastructure.
Engineers have been restricting traffic to affected infrastructure, rolling back certain software configurations and attempting to increase capacity to stabilise the services.
Even after the underlying infrastructure is restored, users may not regain access immediately. Applications need time to reconnect to servers and resume normal functionality.