Microsoft outage disrupts businesses, govts worldwide

Texas: Microsoft's global outage disrupted businesses, government operations and communication services across several countries on Friday, leaving millions of users struggling to access Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 applications as the technology giant battled to restore services.

Microsoft said the disruption affected a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings linked to its Exchange Online and email services. Its AI assistant Copilot was also among the services reported to be experiencing problems.

The company said its engineers were investigating the cause and adopting a "measured approach" to identify and repair the affected infrastructure. It ruled out any indication of malicious activity and said the incident was being treated with urgency.

Microsoft said it has completed recovery actions across parts of its affected infrastructure in the Asia Pacific region and traffic is being gradually restored, even as its Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook email, remained disrupted for a second day.

According to Microsoft, more than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 applications. Outage tracker Downdetector recorded around 130,000 reports of Outlook-related problems from users across dozens of countries at the peak of the disruption.

In India, Air India said its flight operations remained unaffected, although it temporarily rerouted email services to ensure customer queries were received. IndiGo reported disruptions to its email support, but said alternative customer support channels and flight operations continued normally.

The disruption also affected government agencies in Singapore, the Philippines and Japan. Singapore's Government Technology Agency reported government email problems, while the Philippines' Supreme Court said some operations, including email responses, were affected. Japan said it had arranged alternative communication channels.

In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft had drawn parallels with the 2024 CrowdStrike disruption, although the company did not believe the latest incident involved a cyberattack.

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The Hans India