Microsoft 365 outage: Bots, call centres, net banking find prominence as online email services stall globally

Banks and financial institutions in India saw a listless working Friday, as online email communication broke down across the region after Microsoft faced a widespread service disruption, affecting Outlook, Microsoft 365, Teams and its AI assistant Copilot.

Lakhs of users reported difficulties accessing the company's services for more than 10 hours. The outage affected users across the Americas and other regions, including India, leaving many unable to access Exchange Online mailboxes.

India's largest private lender, HDFC Bank, took to its X account to say: “Looks like your inbox is taking the day off. Your banking plans don't have to. With HDFC Bank, stay on top of your banking needs, even when your emails aren't.”

All alternative channels, such as phone banking, net banking and mobile banking, remained available across banking and financial institutions.

“It is virtually like a break. Most of the communication with customers has been difficult, though banking operations were normal,” a source at one of the private sector banks said, on condition of anonymity.

A source at another private sector bank said: “We are neither getting feedback nor brickbats. There is nothing much the technology team can do in this case. Communication through chatbots and call centres are fully functional,” he said.

Corporate work has anyway been unhurried due to the nationwide Diwali holidays, which started on November 6 and continued until November 11. Most professionals and customers/clients have extended their holidays over the past two days.

A cloud alert from Microsoft said: “Microsoft services have been experiencing a global service disruption since last night. At present, Microsoft Teams is operational, while other Microsoft services may be inaccessible or experience intermittent disruptions.”

Microsoft attributed the disruption to an unexpected loss of server availability, which placed additional pressure on the remaining infrastructure. The company said some servers were also failing automated health checks.

To contain the problem, Microsoft has paused deployments, redirected additional traffic away from the affected infrastructure and begun restarting impacted servers.