The outage also affected business services that rely on Microsoft’s systems. OpenAI said it was investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors, warning that new connections could be broken and tools might not work as expected.
Washington: Microsoft’s workplace services, including Outlook and Teams, remained disrupted for users in India and elsewhere on Friday, a day after a global outage began, with the company saying it was still working to pinpoint the cause and is not aware of any malicious activity behind it.
Microsoft’s service health page showed “service degradation” for Microsoft 365 business and enterprise customers as well as its consumer products, as of an update at 11.16 am India time on Friday.
The company said it was pursuing multiple workstreams to pinpoint the underlying cause of a traffic influx and to recover its backend servers.
“As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident,” it said, adding that full details of the root cause would be shared in a post-incident report once the issue is mitigated.
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, the airline said in a post on X on Friday, asking customers who need urgent assistance to reach out to 6E Skai through its website or mobile app.
Features of Microsoft 365 services that interact with Exchange Online and email are affected, while those that do not depend on it remain functional.
Users may be unable to access their mailboxes through Outlook on the web and Outlook desktop, and email delivery may be delayed, it said. Users may also be unable to load Copilot Chat or receive responses in the web and desktop apps, and Copilot experiences may be unable to access work data such as email, calendar, and files.
On Teams, most core functions such as joining calls and meetings, group chats and channel messages are not affected, but calendar-related tasks such as scheduling and viewing meetings may fail, Microsoft said.
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”.
A Microsoft services outage disrupted Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 applications on Friday, affecting thousands of users and also causing problems with connectors used by artificial intelligence services from OpenAI and Anthropic.
Microsoft was still working to restore affected servers as of 6 pm Eastern Time, with the company reporting limited recovery as users gradually reconnected to its services.
According to Downdetector, reports of problems with Outlook peaked at 1,38,058 around 1 pm ET. Reports of Microsoft 365 issues had fallen to nearly 13,000 by 5:47 pm ET, while 763 users reported trouble accessing Teams.
Microsoft said the disruption was linked to several servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable under elevated load, rather than an increase in traffic.
“We are aware and investigating reports of users experiencing issues with Microsoft 365 services, primarily issues with Exchange Online,” the report said, citing a Microsoft spokesperson.
The company said restored servers had remained stable and that it was shifting traffic to alternate routes wherever possible while working to bring the remaining affected servers back online.
“As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect,” Microsoft said in a statement.
The outage also affected business services that rely on Microsoft’s systems. OpenAI said it was investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors, warning that new connections could be broken and tools might not work as expected.
Anthropic also identified an issue with an upstream provider that was affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.
The disruption had a direct impact on at least one company’s business schedule. Electric truck maker Workhorse Group rescheduled the announcement of its third-quarter results, originally expected on November 12, to November 16, citing business disruptions caused by the global Microsoft outage, Reuters reported.
The incident follows another disruption involving Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform last month, which affected the company’s productivity software and a range of industries worldwide.
ANI