Microsoft 365 services 'recovered' after a worldwide disruption

Microsoft 365 services are effectively "recovered" through mitigating efforts following a broad outage on Friday. Access to many apps worldwide was disrupted due to a configuration change in Azure backend workloads. Certain services, like Teams and PowerBI, remain partially unavailable even after certain ones, like Microsoft Defender and SharePoint Online, are restored.

While Teams users are unable to access group chats, presence and user registration, PowerBI service is currently available in only read-only mode. Microsoft was quick to acknowledge the issue and said they “remain committed in treating this event with the highest priority and urgency while we continue to address the lingering impact for the remaining Microsoft 365 apps that are in a degraded state.”

The company also said that they will be “rerouting the impacted traffic to alternate systems to alleviate impact”. While some services are still down, Microsoft said they are now seeing a positive trend in service availability.

The cloud service also went in the Central U.S. region, causing several airlines like Frontier Airlines to cancel 147 and delay 212 flights. Sun Country and Allegiant also said that they had to delay 45 per cent and 27 per cent of their total flights.

In India, Spicejet, IndiGo, Air India, Vistara and Akasa Air are reportedly facing technical difficulties affecting booking, check-in, and flight updates. As a temporary measure, affected Indian airlines are handing out hand-written boarding passes for flights.

Apart from Delhi and Mumbai airports, the Microsoft outage is also reportedly affecting flight operations at Berlin airport, all Spanish airports, Japan’s Narita airport and Singapore’s Changi airport. In a post on X, Melbourne Airport said that they are also experiencing a “global technology issue” which is currently impacting check-in procedures for some airlines.

In response to the widespread outage, the Indian aviation ministry is asking affected airline operators to inform passengers about delays and cancellation via SMS. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Ashiwini Vaishnaw said the government has reached out to Microsoft who is currently working on resolving the issue.