Microsoft outage: Global business operations, airline services and workplace activities hit

New Delhi: Microsoft is currently facing a major outage affecting its services across platforms, including Outlook, Teams, Copilot, Microsoft 365, and SharePoint. The disruption is impacting users worldwide who use Microsoft-based services for work and other purposes.

Businesses that rely on Outlook for communication are facing difficulties accessing their inboxes and sending and receiving e-mails. Other Microsoft-based services, which play a crucial role in work and business, are also impacted by the outage. Many users have raised complaints regarding Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint Online, etc.

One thing that can be deduced from the situation is that the outage, which has already crossed the 10-hour mark, can severely impact operations involving billions of dollars.

How it began

The issue first emerged on November 12, 2026, following which many users raised complaints regarding difficulties in accessing Outlook, Teams, and other workplace tools.

At the time, Microsoft attributed the issue to elevated load on a portion of its infrastructure, which might be contributing to the connectivity errors. Later, it was suggested that the load was due to multiple servers being unexpectedly unavailable.

According to the latest update by the tech giant, efforts are underway to recover the frontend servers while implementing further traffic optimisation actions to improve service stability and increase capacity.

Impact on operations

Business operations and workplace activities that depend on Microsoft's services have been hit the hardest. Apart from employees not being able to check and send emails, the overall performance of organisations is also being affected.

According to Microsoft's Annual Report 2026, Microsoft 365 Copilot reached over 30 million paid seats. Moreover, Microsoft Cloud revenue increased 27% to $214.4 billion, and Microsoft 365 Commercial cloud revenue increased 17%. Microsoft's vast presence among users translates into a major impact when a disruption hits.

IndiGo and Akasa Air informed passengers that their email support services were affected by the disruption and that they might be unable to receive emails. SpiceJet, on the other hand, has reportedly cancelled three flights due to the glitch: Delhi to Pune, Delhi to Leh, and Delhi to Mumbai.

Global impact

US artificial intelligence company Anthropic has reported an issue with an upstream provider that was affecting its Microsoft 365 connector. OpenAI is also investigating an issue related to Microsoft connectors. It has warned that new connections might be broken and tools might not work as expected.

According to reports, Japan government's email services became unavailable due to the outage at Microsoft. Pharmaceutical firms have been resorting to phone calls to communicate with business partners who usually depend on emails. Shipping firms are also unable to accept online reservations.

Moreover, the technical glitch has impacted spy agency and federal police in Australia, according to reports. Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Director-General Mike Burgess and Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett have confirmed that their organisations have been affected.