Microsoft Resolves Global Outage After 36 Hours, Restores Outlook and Teams

New Delhi: A major technical disruption to Microsoft's cloud services has finally ended after more than 36 hours. The company said on the morning of Saturday, November 14 that the technical reasons causing the problem have been resolved. After this, Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other services of Microsoft 365 have started working again. Due to this outage, millions of users around the world faced problems in email, meetings and important office-related work.

According to the company, now customers using Outlook, Teams and Copilot should not face this problem. However, Microsoft is constantly monitoring its network and email systems. The company has also apologised for the disruption and has promised to release a detailed report of the entire matter.

When and how did Microsoft's troubles start?

The problem with Microsoft's services began on Thursday, November 12. First, users complained about problems accessing Exchange Online mailboxes. After this the impact of the problem spread to services like Outlook, Teams, Copilot, SharePoint, Planner and To Do.

Core messaging and online meeting features on Teams were largely functional, but features like calendars and meeting scheduling that rely on Exchange Online were affected. Copilot users also had trouble loading chats and accessing information related to email, calendars and files.

What was the reason for the technical fault?

After investigation, Microsoft said that the reason for the outage was a technical problem related to the network. The issue was related to an earlier network capacity upgrade that occurred after another recent network change.

The company clarified that no cyber attack or artificial intelligence agent was behind this incident. Microsoft has called it a purely technical problem.

Impacted in more than 70 countries?

The effect of this outage was seen in more than 70 countries. The work of many companies, government institutions and common users was affected. In India too, its impact reached the airlines.

IndiGo said its email support services have been affected and customers may have trouble receiving emails. The airline advised using its website and app for immediate assistance. Air India said that its flight operations remained normal and email traffic was diverted to maintain contact with customers.

AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic also reported problems with Microsoft 365 connectors. Through these connectors their services access office-related information.

What did Microsoft say?

The company said that instead of restoring the services all at once, it was started in a phased manner so that the stability of the system could be checked at every level. The timeout period has also been increased to 48 hours to handle late-arriving emails.

Microsoft apologised to customers and partners and said it was fully investigating the incident. A detailed post-incident report will be issued after the investigation is completed. This incident has once again raised the question of how risky it can be for companies to depend on some big cloud platforms for essential digital services.