A widespread Microsoft outage disrupted business operations, workplace communication and essential digital services across the globe, including India, Australia, Japan and the US, leaving a large number of users struggling to access emails and connect to critical applications.The disruption hit Indian airlines, financial services firms and businesses. Domestic airlines IndiGo, Air India and Akasa Air reported disruptions to email-based customer support, affecting their ability to receive or respond to some passenger queries. Air India temporarily rerouted email services to ensure customer communications continued reaching the airline, while flight operations were not reported to have been affected.Global blackoutSeveral Microsoft 365 services were hit across the globeAmong them were Outlook email, Teams, Copilot, SharePoint Online and OneDriveOver 43 crore people use Microsoft 365 applicationsSeveral Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams, Copilot, SharePoint Online and OneDrive, experienced significant disruptions from November 12, with the problem continuing into Friday despite the company’s efforts to restore normal operations.According to reports citing Microsoft, the company said on Friday that it had completed recovery efforts across parts of its affected infrastructure in the Asia Pacific region, with network traffic being gradually restored. However, several services, particularly Outlook email, continued to experience disruptions for the second consecutive day.According to outage-tracking platform Downdetector, nearly 1.3 lakh users reported problems accessing Outlook shortly after 1 pm local time. Though the number subsequently declined, several users continued to complain about being unable to send or receive emails, while others reported difficulties loading their inboxes. Over 43 crore people use Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft said on its website.The company’s service health dashboard continued to display a “service degradation” warning for Microsoft 365 business and enterprise customers as well as consumer products in an update issued at 4.30 pm (IST) on Friday.Microsoft said its engineering teams were working on multiple fronts to identify the root cause of an unusual surge in traffic, restore backend servers and stabilise the affected systems.A series of posts by the company on X suggested its engineers were struggling to get the problem fully under control. Hours after saying it managed to successfully restore service health and functionality, the company said it had updated its list of impacted services and was continuing to address the issue.“We regret the disruption today’s outage has caused for many of our customers. Our global teams continue to work with urgency to resolve the issue,” Puneet Chandok, president of Microsoft India and South Asia, said in a post on LinkedIn.The disruption was reported across several countries in the Asia Pacific region as well as the US and other parts of the world. Businesses, educational institutions and government agencies were among those affected, with employees facing difficulties accessing essential workplace tools and carrying out routine professional communication.Microsoft’s service health dashboard had earlier flagged the disruption at 11.16 am (IST) on Friday, confirming degradation across Microsoft 365 business, enterprise and consumer services. The company said its technical teams were investigating the sudden surge in traffic and working to bring the affected infrastructure back to normal.The outage also had repercussions for the aviation sector. Several airlines, including IndiGo and Akasa Air, reported operational delays amid the disruption. SpiceJet also informed customers about intermittent connectivity issues with its customer care helpline numbers, although the airline subsequently announced that the helplines had been restored and were functioning normally.