A global Microsoft outage disrupted email, collaboration and workplace applications at Indian companies and airlines on Friday, forcing teams to alter meeting plans and wait for messages to move through congested systems. For businesses, it was the second such Microsoft disruption this year.
Outlook and Teams, among the most widely used workplace applications, were at the center of the disruption. Some employees found Outlook slow while Teams continued to work normally, allowing scheduled meetings to proceed. Others reported unstable connections across multiple services. Employees at ABB, HPE, EY, Infosys and Accenture were among those who reported unstable connectivity.
Tata Motors moved a media call on its second-quarter results from Teams to Zoom. A Swiss multinational company also held a scheduled virtual interaction with journalists, but participants encountered extremely patchy connectivity.
Airlines including IndiGo, Akasa Air and Air India reported disruptions to their email support services.
Microsoft reports gradual recovery
Microsoft said on Friday that services were gradually recovering, though some users could continue to face intermittent issues. In a post on X, the company said it was seeing “encouraging recovery progress,” with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure.
Microsoft said it was prioritizing the reduction of email queues and backlogs. It retained an extended 48-hour email timeout window to protect delayed messages while delivery caught up. The Redmond-based technology giant had earlier attributed the outage to server issues, which also affected its Copilot AI assistant. A broader rollout of software fixes was helping stabilize the system, Microsoft said, adding that it was not aware of any malicious activity.
A senior Kyndryl employee in Bengaluru said email notifications were working, but messages were taking considerably longer to reach inboxes. Services were gradually being restored toward the evening. An employee at one of India’s largest IT services companies said he attended four Teams meetings without glitches, even as email services remained slow.
Companies issue employee alerts
Cognizant described the incident as an “Ongoing global outage” affecting Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Copilot and single sign-on authentication. It said phased recovery was under way. Infosys sent SMS alerts to employees saying several Microsoft services, including Exchange Online, Copilot, Purview and SharePoint, were down. Teams was working, the alert said, and Microsoft was trying to restore the affected services.
The outage also renewed concerns about corporate dependence on a small number of technology providers for both workplace software and cloud infrastructure. Sachin Panicker, chief AI officer at Fulcrum Digital, said outages of this kind show how much of the modern enterprise runs on a handful of shared platforms. When email, collaboration and AI assistants fail together, a business loses the workflows built on top of them, not just a tool, he said.
As companies integrate AI into daily operations, Panicker said they need to identify dependencies on individual providers, maintain alternative systems and ensure that AI-dependent processes can continue in a limited capacity during disruptions.
Some companies reported little impact. Sudip Sengupta, managing partner and director of Brollyca, a boutique consultancy specializing in software architecture design, said his firm’s internal systems were largely unaffected. He said internal tools run on Zoho and Google Workspace, making it almost business as usual, apart from some issues with one client’s OneDrive at one point. Friday was a weekend day for the majority of his clients, he added.
