Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Nov 13: After a 15-hour service outage that began on Thursday, Microsoft said working hard to get its service back online, after massive outage knocked out millions of users across the world who are dependent on Outlook, Teams, Microsoft 365, and a bunch of other apps. On Friday, the software company said recovery actions have been completed in several parts of the Asia Pacific region. The widespread global Microsoft outage affected Outlook, Teams, Copilot, and Microsoft 365 services and is still in the process of gradual recovery.
The trouble started on Thursday and has escalated through Friday impacting many businesses, government offices and airlines all over the world, including in India. Not only businesses, the operations and email support for leading airlines like IndiGo, Akasa Air, Air India and more are facing disruption due to outage, causing lot of communication gap. Although Microsoft have stated that some of its latest fixes are working, but everything is yet to be restored, without specifying the expected timeline.
“Traffic is being gradually restored, and we’re seeing improvements in key customer scenarios, including mailbox access and delayed email processing. However, some users may continue to experience intermittent issues,” the company said in its statement. However, the tech giant has stated that the outage is not caused by a cybersecurity breach. A Microsoft executive confirmed on Thursday that the outage is not a result of “malicious or cyber activity.”
“We will continue to share more information as soon as we have it, and for now I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity,” Charles Lamanna, executive vice president of Copilot, Agents, and Platform at Microsoft, said in a post on X.
According to Dowandetector, the outage reached 74 countries and territories in an hour with many users encountering trouble using their email accounts and other errors across the tech giant’s suite of apps. Microsoft said that it was investigating disruptions, notably related to its email and Teams applications.
In updates posted on social media, Washington-based Microsoft said it was aware of users “experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas.” In India airlines operations have been impacted with SpiceJet cancelling three flights from Delhi to Pune, Darbhanga and Mumbai.
Microsoft has been investigating the disruption, with the problem appearing to involve a configuration change that left some servers overloaded and unavailable. The company’s initial updates pointed to elevated infrastructure load and connectivity problems. As affected servers became unavailable, traffic was redirected to other machines, increasing pressure on the remaining infrastructure.
Microsoft has been digging reasons which has straight caused to a failure inside its own infrastructure. The heart of the issue was a key process that handles secure connections. When that broke down, their servers got overwhelmed and stopped responding. Automated checks failed, and as more servers went offline, the pressure shifted to the ones still running. Those eventually started failing too, and the whole thing spiralled.
At the same time, Microsoft had just rolled out a network configuration change that lined up suspiciously with the start of the outage. They are rolling back those changes and patching things to steady the ship.
From what many reports have stated, the outage sits with Microsoft’s own infrastructure and operations teams. They control the servers, set up the network, and handle the clean-up. Microsoft has not singled out any individual or team, though. They have rather promised a full report once things are back to normal.
The recovery process proved more complicated than expected. Microsoft found that some servers stopped responding again after they were brought back online and traffic returned. This created a difficult cycle: restoring servers increased available capacity but the returning traffic caused some machines to become unresponsive.
Engineers began restricting traffic to affected infrastructure, rolling back certain software configurations and attempting to increase capacity. Microsoft has also said there is no indication that the outage was caused by a cyberattack or malicious activity. The disruption appears to have been linked to infrastructure and configuration problems rather than a security breach.
The company has not set any fixed deadline for full recovery but the entire team has been working on to pulling up the server back to reconnect professionals as well as users across the world.