Microsoft 365 outage chaos: Teams, Outlook disruptions hit airlines in India, banks and finance in Asia, govts across world

Outlook and Teams were among the Microsoft 365 productivity and collaboration apps that went down for hundreds of thousands of users across the world from Thursday night. Trading desks in financial markets went back to phones, and Indian carriers such as Air India and IndiGo issued alerts. Downdetector recorded the outage in 74 countries. Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint, Copilot and Defender XDR were all hit.

Microsoft outage: Scale of the problem

On Thursday night (Nov 12), outage reports worldwide peaked at about 140,000, more than 2,000 times the normal level. In the US, Outlook downtime reports peaked at more than 130,000. Other affected countries include the UK, Japan, Australia and India. Across sectors, employees had trouble accessing Outlook email and logging into their official accounts. Recovery efforts continued into Friday as fixes failed to deliver sustained results. Email traffic to many of Microsoft's approximately 450 million users was halted.

Outlook and Exchange Online were the worst affected, with mailbox access failing on web, desktop and mobile, and email delivery delayed.

Teams' core messaging and online meetings mostly worked, but calendar access, meeting scheduling, invites, contacts, and private and shared channels were disrupted.

Also impacted were SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Copilot's chat and work-data access, Defender XDR, Intune, Power BI, Purview, Planner, To Do, Windows 365 and related features.

Consumer services, including Outlook.com, OneDrive, OneNote, To Do and Microsoft 365 for the web, were also degraded.

Indian airlines hit by Microsoft outage, some flights cancelled

IndiGo said it might not be able to receive customers' emails and asked them to contact via its website or app. Akasa Air's email support services were experiencing delays. Air India said its flight operations and customer support channels were not affected, and that it had implemented temporary email rerouting.
SpiceJet cancelled its Delhi-Pune, Delhi-Leh and Delhi-Mumbai flights and delayed its Delhi-Darbhanga and Delhi-Mumbai flights.

Banking and finance affected across Asia

In Hong Kong, bankers at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs were locked out of email and Teams all day. In Taiwan, fund management at securities firms, life insurers and investment trust companies was hit. In Thailand, Krungthai Bank's email services were disrupted, affecting customer service. Standard Chartered, ING Australia and other banks warned of scammers posing as tech support to exploit the chaos.

Governments affected from America to Australia

In Japan, the government went back to paper as ministries were unable to send email for most of Friday's workday. Australia's spy agency and federal police were affected, and Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said the government had activated an agreement to ensure Australia was prioritised in restoring services. The Philippine Supreme Court warned of delays, while Australian schools and courts opened to dead inboxes.

The US House of Representatives reported disruption, saying its engineers were working with Microsoft, while city governments from Miami Beach to Austin told residents to phone instead. A Colorado sheriff's office said the outage delayed bond payments for prisoners.

Microsoft's response: ‘Not a cyber attack’

Microsoft said a number of servers were unexpectedly unavailable, straining the remaining infrastructure, and that a core process on the affected servers was being overwhelmed, causing a loss of capacity.
It has paused all deployments, redistributed traffic across its global infrastructure and begun restarting servers. It is also considering reverting a small number of recent configuration changes.
It warned that restored servers could become unresponsive again once they received traffic.

Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's executive vice president for Copilot, Agents and Platform, wrote on X that there was no indication of malicious or cyber activity.