For millions of professionals in India, Friday was a workday spent refreshing an inbox that wouldn't update. By evening, the first delayed emails had finally started arriving in Outlook. Microsoft says it is seeing early stabilisation after an outage of almost 16 hours that also took down Teams and its AI assistant, Copilot.
The biggest worry for many users was whether emails sent during the disruption had simply disappeared. Microsoft's latest update tries to answer that. The company said it has extended the email timeout window to 48 hours, which gives queued messages more time to be delivered instead of bouncing or expiring.
"To protect delayed mail, we've extended the email timeout window to 48 hours while queue and backlog processing continues," Microsoft 365 said in a post on X.
A slow, phased recovery
Microsoft was careful not to declare the problem solved. "Recovery actions are ongoing across affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure and progressing in phases. We're seeing incremental improvement in several workloads, but service health remains variable and capacity has not yet fully returned to baseline," the company said.
It added that recovery actions are now complete on parts of the affected infrastructure and traffic is being restored gradually. "We're seeing improvements in key scenarios, including mailbox access and delayed email processing, though some intermittent issues may continue. Our focus is extending these recovery actions across remaining affected infrastructure while continuing stabilization and adding capacity to improve consistency," Microsoft said.
The outage began on Thursday night. Microsoft linked it to server health-check failures that left affected servers unavailable. Engineers first tested configuration changes and restarted servers, then introduced an alternative health-check method that allowed some of them to come back into service.
Why this one hurt more than usual
This was not a brief glitch. The disruption hit businesses, airlines and government operations in several countries, and it affected multiple Microsoft 365 products tied to Exchange Online and the company's email infrastructure.
The scale shows how much depends on a single provider. Many Indian companies, from IT services firms and startups to banks and government offices, run email, meetings, documents and now AI tools on the same Microsoft 365 stack. When the underlying email infrastructure fails, there is often no backup channel ready: Teams, Outlook and Copilot can go down together.
Copilot being affected adds a newer concern. Many organisations have been building AI assistants into everyday work, so this outage was also a reminder that those tools are only as reliable as the cloud underneath them.
What users and IT teams should do now
For everyday users, the advice is simple: don't resend everything in a panic. With the 48-hour window in place, most delayed emails should eventually arrive, and resending can create duplicates once the backlog clears. Time-sensitive messages are worth confirming by phone or another channel.
IT administrators can follow the detailed updates under incident number "MO1550821" in the Microsoft 365 admin centre, and anyone can check progress on Microsoft's service status page.
Once services are fully restored, many businesses will likely revisit their contingency plans, including backup communication tools, offline access to critical documents, and clear internal processes for when a core cloud platform goes dark. For now, the inboxes are slowly filling up again.
