Microsoft's Outlook and Exchange Online outage disrupts global email, hitting India's banks and airlines

Microsoft is experiencing a global outage affecting Outlook and Exchange Online services, disrupting email communications for organizations worldwide, including banks and airlines in India, which have switched to alternative platforms like Teams and SharePoint to maintain operations. The outage began late Thursday, lasting over 24 hours, and also impacted Microsoft's Copilot AI assistant. Microsoft attributed the issue to a large number of servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable and has initiated recovery measures, including restarting affected servers and rerouting traffic. The company's stock fell as much as 2.5% in early Friday US trade, wiping out about $100 billion in market value before recouping some losses. In India, core banking and payment infrastructure appeared unaffected, but customer instruction processing and transaction confirmations were delayed. Airlines like IndiGo and Air India reported email support disruptions while maintaining flight operations. Microsoft said it is seeing "encouraging recovery progress" and is reviewing the incident to prevent future occurrences.