Microsoft outage slows email delivery for airlines

Hong Kong: Microsoft’s outage, which has affected services such as Outlook and Teams across Asia and the US, continued for hours on Friday, disrupting many users, businesses, and some government operations as the tech giant worked to resolve the issue. In an update, Microsoft said the outage was affecting a broad range of Microsoft 365 services that rely on Exchange Online and email systems. Users reported that Outlook, Teams, and the AI assistant Copilot were among the services experiencing problems.

The Redmond, Washington-based company said it was using several approaches to determine the cause of the disruption and bring its servers back online, taking “a measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure.” Microsoft added that it had found no evidence the outage was caused by malicious activity and said it would handle the incident “with urgency and priority until full resolution.” According to outage tracker Downdetector, more than 130,000 users reported issues accessing Outlook earlier on Thursday, though reports have since dropped from that peak. Posts from the company on X suggested its engineers were still struggling to fully contain the problem. Even after saying it had successfully restored service health and functionality, Microsoft later said it had revised its list of affected services and was still working on the issue.

Its latest update offered little reassurance to users hoping for a quick fix. “We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” the company wrote. The outage also forced US-based industrial technology company Workhorse Group Inc.

to postpone a conference call on its quarterly earnings. In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Friday that Microsoft had compared the widespread outage to the CrowdStrike incident in 2024. Burke said he had spoken with Microsoft’s senior executive in Australia and the government’s national cybersecurity coordinator about the global disruption.

“They don’t believe they are dealing with a cyberattack. They believe that they are dealing in some ways similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry,” Burke told reporters in Sydney. CrowdStrike, a Texas-based cybersecurity company, had blamed a bug in an update that caused its systems to send faulty data to millions of customer computers, triggering a major global tech outage in July 2024 that grounded flights, knocked television broadcasts off air, and disrupted banks, hospitals, and retailers.

In Hong Kong, businessperson Danny Lau, who runs an aluminum company, said his firm’s Outlook accounts were unable to receive updates from US customers because of the outage. If it continued much longer, he said, it could “impact the production timeline.” Air India said its flight operations were not affected by the Microsoft outage worldwide. However, the airline temporarily redirected its email services so that customer inquiries would continue reaching the company without interruption, it said in a statement.

IndiGo, another Indian airline, said its email support services were also disrupted, limiting its ability to receive customer queries. In a post on X, the airline said its other support channels remained available and that flight operations were unaffected. Singapore’s Government Technology Agency said government emails were down and that it was working with Microsoft to fix the problem.

The Philippines’ Supreme Court said in a statement on X that the ongoing Microsoft 365 outage had affected some of its operations, including email responses. In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said the outage had affected the government’s IT infrastructure and that officials were “keeping a close eye on the developments.” OpenAI and Anthropic also said they were experiencing trouble connecting with Microsoft 365 tools, highlighting how outages can ripple further as more people rely on artificial intelligence platforms to work with other companies’ software. Orissa POST – Odisha’s No.1 English Daily