Air India on Friday said its flight operations were running normally despite the ongoing global Microsoft outage, adding that its communication channels remained unaffected.
The airline said it was closely monitoring the situation and had temporarily rerouted its emails to ensure that customer messages continued to reach it. It also assured passengers that their emails would be answered within the usual 24-hour timeframe.
According to Air India, all customer support channels, including voice support, AI.g, social media and customer notifications, were functioning normally.
However, IndiGo said its email support services had been affected by the disruption and that it might not be able to receive emails from customers. The airline said its other support channels remained operational and advised passengers requiring urgent assistance to contact its AI assistant, 6E Skai, through its website or mobile app.
Akasa Air also reported delays in its email support services, saying it might be unable to receive customer emails. It advised passengers seeking immediate assistance to contact its 24-hour Akasa Care Centre or reach out through its social media platforms.
All three airlines said they were monitoring the situation and apologised for the inconvenience caused to passengers.
Meanwhile, Microsoft’s workplace services, including Outlook and Teams, continued to face disruptions in India and other parts of the world on Friday, marking the second day of the global outage.
As per Microsoft’s service health page, Microsoft 365 business and enterprise services, along with some consumer products, were experiencing ‘service degradation’ as of 11.16 am IST on Friday.
The company said it was pursuing multiple workstreams to identify the underlying cause of a traffic influx and restore its backend servers. It also clarified that it had found no evidence of malicious activity behind the incident. Microsoft said it would share details of the root cause in a post-incident report once the issue was resolved.
In its latest update, the company reported partial recovery in regions where adjustments had been implemented. However, it said these measures had not yet resulted in sustained service restoration.
Microsoft said the disruption was not caused by an increase in overall traffic but by an unexpected number of servers becoming unavailable. It was exploring alternative ways to increase infrastructure capacity and address persistent traffic-management imbalances.
The company also said it was working to strengthen infrastructure capacity in affected regions as services gradually recovered. However, it acknowledged that restoring normal operations remained challenging and that further corrective measures would be introduced after the existing changes were confirmed to be stable.
The outage has affected several Microsoft services, including Outlook, Teams, OneDrive and its artificial intelligence tool Copilot. Features of Microsoft 365 that rely on Exchange Online and email services have been particularly affected, while services that do not depend on them have continued to function.
Users have reported difficulties accessing mailboxes through Outlook’s web and desktop applications, along with delays in email delivery. Some users have also been unable to load Copilot Chat or receive responses through its web and desktop applications. Copilot’s access to work-related data, including emails, calendars and files, has also been affected.
On Microsoft Teams, most core functions, such as joining calls and meetings, group chats and channel messaging, have remained operational. However, calendar-related features, including scheduling and viewing meetings, may not work as expected.
In India, users began reporting problems at around 11 pm on Thursday, according to outage tracker Downdetector. Reports declined overnight but began rising again after 6 am on Friday.
Globally, reports of Outlook-related problems on Downdetector peaked at nearly 1.4 lakh around 6 pm GMT on Thursday.
Amid the disruption, Microsoft Executive Vice-President Charles Lamanna ruled out malicious or cyber activity as the cause of the outage.