Microsoft services gradually restored in Asia Pacific, but Outlook disruption continues
The company says mailbox access is improving, while some users continue to face intermittent issues; its focus is now on extending recovery actions to other regions
New Delhi, Nov 13 (PTI) Microsoft on Friday said it has completed recovery actions across parts of its affected infrastructure in the Asia Pacific region and traffic is being gradually restored, even as its Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook email, remained disrupted for a second day.
The company’s service health page continued to show “service degradation” for Microsoft 365 business and enterprise customers and its consumer products as of an update at 4:30 pm IST.
Microsoft said it was seeing improvements in mailbox access and delayed email processing, but some users may continue to experience intermittent issues. Its focus is now on extending the recovery actions to affected infrastructure in other regions and on 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.
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 with the root cause after mitigation is complete.
In India, airline IndiGo said its email support services were impacted due to the global Microsoft service disruption, and it may not be able to receive customers’ emails. All other support channels remain available, it said in a post on X.
Akasa Air also said its email support services were experiencing delays because of the disruption and asked passengers needing immediate help to contact its 24/7 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 so that messages continued to reach it without interruption.
Features of Microsoft 365 services that interact with Exchange Online and email are affected, while those that do not depend on it remain functional, according to Microsoft’s status page.
Users may be unable to access their mailboxes through Outlook on the web and Outlook desktop, and email delivery may be delayed, it said. On Teams, most core functions, such as joining calls and meetings, group chats and channel messages, are not affected, but calendar-related tasks may fail. Indian users began flagging problems around 11 pm on Thursday, according to outage tracker website Downdetector.
The number of outage reports on the website moderated overnight; they spiked again after 6 am on Friday.
The company said on X that the strain on its systems came not from a rise in traffic but from "a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable". PTI