New Delhi: Microsoft has restored its services following a major global disruption that affected Outlook email and several Microsoft 365 applications. The company has apologised to customers and partners for the inconvenience, attributing the outage to a technical glitch during a network capacity upgrade.
Microsoft’s service status webpage on Saturday morning confirmed that all products were operational. Both enterprise and commercial services under Microsoft 365, as well as applications used by individual consumers, had returned to normal.
“We sincerely apologise for the impact this incident had on our customers and partners. We take the trust our customers place in our services very seriously,” the company said in a post on X.
Network upgrade glitch triggered outage
Microsoft said the global disruption was caused by an issue linked to a previous network upgrade, which affected services following a recent network change.
The company clarified that the incident was not related to a cyberattack, artificial intelligence (AI) or AI agents. Instead, it was caused by a technical fault within its network infrastructure.
Although the underlying issue was fixed, services were restored in phases rather than being brought back online simultaneously. Microsoft said it checked the stability of each stage before proceeding with the next, a process that took additional time but helped ensure service reliability.
Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s executive vice-president of the Copilot, Agents and Platform division, said a fault in one part of the network had spread to other systems, making the restoration process more complicated.
The company has promised to publish a detailed investigation report explaining how the disruption began, the steps taken to resolve it and the measures planned to prevent similar incidents in the future.
Indian airlines and financial firms affected
The global outage, which began late Thursday, disrupted business operations in several countries, including India.
Airlines such as IndiGo, Air India and Akasa Air experienced disruptions to their email-based customer support services. The affected systems made it difficult for the airlines to receive or respond to some passenger emails.
Air India temporarily shifted its email services to an alternative system to ensure that customer communication was not affected. However, there were no reports of disruptions to flight operations.
Financial services companies also faced difficulties accessing research reports and communicating with customers.
The disruption primarily affected Microsoft’s cloud-based email platform, Exchange Online. Users reported difficulties accessing emails through the Outlook website and desktop application, while email delivery was also delayed.
At the height of the outage, Downdetector recorded more than 1.3 lakh reports related to Outlook services. Disruptions were reported across 72 to 74 countries, highlighting the widespread impact of the incident.
