A large Microsoft 365 outage that began on Thursday was still disrupting email and collaboration services on Friday, with effects on airlines, courts and government offices in several Asia-Pacific countries. As of a report at 5.45 pm IST on Friday, recovery was still going on and Microsoft had announced no full fix.
What failed
The trouble began in Exchange Online, the cloud email service behind business Outlook, and users had trouble reaching mailboxes on the web and in the desktop app. Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive and Microsoft 365 Copilot all had disruptions, and Exchange problems also hit some Teams features such as calendars, meeting schedules and certain chat functions. Not all Teams features failed. Downdetector logged problems in 74 countries and territories, and at the peak about 130,000 reports in the United States concerned Outlook.
Microsoft said a large number of servers had unexpectedly become unavailable, which overloaded the remaining servers, and that a core process on the affected servers became overloaded and stopped responding. Restarting the servers did not fix it, and some came back online but stopped responding once users reconnected. Microsoft executive Charles Lamanna said there was no indication of malicious or cyber activity. Australia's Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft had compared it to the CrowdStrike incident, an update that went awry; that is the minister's account and not Microsoft's official root cause.
Effects in India and the region
SpiceJet cancelled three Delhi flights, to Pune, Leh and Mumbai, and delayed two, to Darbhanga and Mumbai, on Friday morning. IndiGo said its email support was affected but its other customer channels and flight operations were working, and Akasa Air reported delays in receiving customer emails. Air India said its flight operations and communication channels were unaffected and that it redirected email traffic to keep receiving passenger messages.
Singapore's government technology agency said government email was down and it was working with Microsoft on restoration. The Philippines' Supreme Court said some operations were affected, including email responses. Japan's government said its IT infrastructure was affected, and Australia's federal police and its domestic intelligence agency confirmed their systems were hit. OpenAI and Anthropic reported problems with their Microsoft 365 connectors.
Recovery
Microsoft tried shifting traffic through alternative routes, limiting some incoming requests and rebuilding servers from an earlier software configuration. In its Friday update it reported incremental improvement in several workloads but said service health remained variable and capacity had not fully returned to normal. Recovery actions were completed across parts of the affected infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific region. The final cause and the date of full restoration were not confirmed in the reports available.
