Microsoft’s Outlook Outage Drags On: Indian Enterprises Are Feeling The Heat

by · Inc42

SUMMARY

  • Microsoft's Outlook outage entered its second day on November 13, disrupting Microsoft 365 services across 74 countries, including India, and affecting enterprise workflows.
  • Indian businesses, including IndiGo, Akasa Air, Keka and Equitas Small Finance Bank, reported disruptions to customer support, communication and internal operations.
  • The outage has renewed concerns over enterprise dependence on a handful of cloud providers, with experts flagging the need for stronger business continuity plans and multi-vendor redundancy.
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For Kriti, a Gurugram-based marketing professional, Thursday’s workday came to an abrupt halt even before it began, as Microsoft services went down globally.  

With her company relying heavily on Outlook for official sign-offs, the outage stalled its approval pipeline, forcing employees to turn to alternative communication channels and negotiate deadline extensions to keep work moving.

“With Outlook inaccessible since morning, external communication has been stalled, delaying roughly half a day’s worth of urgent approvals and project rollouts,” she said. 

Kriti’s experience reflects a wider disruption across enterprises and individuals in India and globally. Microsoft Outlook/Office 365 is used at companies such as Infosys, Wipro, Lupin, CitiusTech, CSS Corp, Indigo, along with banks such as State Bank of India, Equitas Small Finance Bank and others.

What Caused The Outage

The outage, which began late on November 12, crippled critical functions across Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Copilot and several other Microsoft 365 services in 74 countries, including India. By November 13, the disruption was still unresolved.

Downdetector data showed Outlook complaints in the country peaking at 2,157 late night on Thursday, easing overnight, then climbing back to nearly 4,000 by 10 AM Friday before settling to over 2,500 by noon. 

Globally, the monitoring website has detected 1,40,000 complaints. To be sure, over 430 Mn people use Microsoft 365 apps according to the company’s website.

The trouble traces back to roughly 11:30 PM IST (6 PM UTC) on Thursday, when a core process responsible for setting up secure connections on Microsoft’s servers became overwhelmed. 

Microsoft said a number of servers began failing automated health checks and dropping out of service, which pushed more load onto the machines left standing, a cascade that eventually hit Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Copilot, Defender for Office 365, Windows 365 Cloud PCs, and even the admin tools IT teams needed to diagnose the mess, such as Intune. Microsoft has attributed this outage to infrastructure failure.