Microsoft outage hits businesses worldwide; India feels impact

The global disruption of multiple Microsoft services, which began on Thursday (November 12, 2026) and continued late into Friday (November 13, 2026), affected several Indian businesses’ internal communications and customer-facing operations.

In its latest update on Friday (November 13, 2026), the company said it was making progress in fixing the outage, which has affected email access and workplace applications in businesses, public services, and other organisations across the globe.

In India, the disruptions affected businesses from startups to multinational corporations. A senior executive at a major telecom company in India told The Hindu that employees were unable to access emails or send service-disruption alerts to customers.

Call-centre traffic also increased, the executive said. Rahul Ganapathy, co-founder and CEO of deep tech startup Atsuya Technologies, said customer emails and scheduled Teams meetings were disrupted, although his company did not rely entirely on Microsoft internally.

At a Big Four professional services firm in Bengaluru, a senior employee said its internal operations were affected, but added that IT teams were restoring services. The disruptions also left airlines experiencing customer-support delays.

IndiGo said its email support was affected and advised customers to use 6E Skai, its AI-powered virtual assistant. Akasa Air warned of email support delays and directed passengers to its customer care centre and social media.

Air India said flight operations were unaffected, although it rerouted emails. Separately, India’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, issued a high-severity advisory on Friday, warning of multiple vulnerabilities in Microsoft products.

It flagged an Outlook vulnerability that it said was being actively exploited and urged users to apply security updates. The advisory did not explicitly link the vulnerabilities to the outage. Microsoft identified Exchange Online — described as its cloud-based messaging platform that delivers email, calendar, contacts, and tasks — as the primary service affected.

Some Microsoft Graph requests accessing Exchange Online data timed out, affecting dependent features in Teams, Copilot, and SharePoint, the company said. Core Teams messaging and online meetings largely continued normally, it added.

On Friday, Microsoft said recovery was progressing, with improvements in North America and Europe and encouraging signs in Asia-Pacific. Service availability and email delivery were improving, but intermittent access problems and delays could continue, it said, adding that it was working through email backlogs and retained a 48-hour timeout window to protect delayed messages.

Service health and capacity had not fully returned to baseline, it said. Around 8 p.m. IST on Friday (November 13, 2026), Charles Lamanna, executive vice president of Copilot, Agents and Platform at Microsoft, said, "We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure.

We know our customers rely on our services to get important work done every day, and regret the impact these outages had on those who depend on us. Our teams are reviewing what happened and how we can prevent similar issues going forward." The company said it was not aware of any malicious activity causing the disruption and promised that it would publish a detailed report on the root cause and corrective measures after services were restored.

In some countries, government services were affected by the outage. Singapore’s Government Technology Agency and Japanese Ministries reported email disruptions, according to local media reports and official notices. In Britain, Rachel Harrison of the GMB Union said National Health Service staff handling emergency calls could not refer to patient details as they normally would, creating a “massive backlog”.

Britain’s National Pharmacy Association said the outage delayed prescriptions, AFP reported. Sai Rahul Poruri, CEO of FOSS United, said India should reduce dependence on external technology providers. He called for a more diverse provider ecosystem, citing Germany’s approach of allowing individual regions to choose their email providers, many of which use free and open-source software.

Sambratha Shetty, chief operating officer of Synergia Foundation, said disruption could delay client deliveries and expose IT firms and global capability centres in Bengaluru to service-level agreement penalties. She called for backup channels, multiple providers, and tested continuity plans.

Ben Mudie, field chief technology officer for APAC at cybersecurity firm Tenable, warned that employees could turn to personal email accounts and unauthorised file-sharing services when workplace systems become unavailable, potentially exposing sensitive company information.