New Delhi, November 13, 2026 (Yes Punjab News)
A prolonged Microsoft outage disrupted businesses, airlines and government operations across several countries on Friday, affecting widely used services such as Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot. The company continued efforts to restore normal operations hours after the disruption began.
Microsoft said the incident affected multiple Microsoft 365 products linked to its Exchange Online and email infrastructure. Users in Asia and the United States reported difficulties accessing services, disrupting internal communications and customer support at organisations dependent on the company’s software.
In its latest update, Microsoft said early signs of stabilisation had emerged, but service capacity remained below normal and performance was still variable as traffic was gradually restored.
The company said engineering teams were working to stabilise affected infrastructure through traffic management, restarts, remediation and a phased return to service. It was also monitoring network conditions and email queues to protect delayed messages.
“As part of this effort, we are extending the email timeout window to 48 hours to help protect delayed messages while service recovery continues,” Microsoft said.
The company added that it had found no indication of malicious activity behind the disruption. It said a detailed post-incident report, including the root cause and measures to prevent similar incidents, would be shared after recovery was complete.
The outage was reflected in reports on tracking platform Downdetector for Outlook, Copilot and other Microsoft services. It also affected business schedules, with US-based industrial technology company Workhorse Group Inc. postponing its quarterly earnings conference call.
In India, airlines including IndiGo and Air India reported difficulties with their email systems, although flight operations remained unaffected.
Singapore’s Government Technology Agency confirmed that government email services were down and said it was working with Microsoft to resolve the issue. In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said the country’s government IT infrastructure had also been affected, adding that authorities were monitoring developments.
Reports from Japan also indicated that some companies and institutions were turning to fax machines as employees rescheduled meetings and routine business operations faced delays.
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