Outlook users receive emails in India as Microsoft extends email timeout window to 48 hours

New Delhi, Nov 13 (IANS) Users in India began to receive emails via Microsoft Outlook on Friday evening, albeit slowly, after nearly a 16-hour long outage across the company services including Teams and Copilot, as the tech giant informed it was seeing early stabilisation and capacity improvements as recovery actions continue.

In its latest update, Microsoft said it has extended email timeout to 48 hours to help preserve delayed emails during the disruption.

“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,” said Microsoft 365 in a post on X.

To protect delayed mail, “we’ve extended the email timeout window to 48 hours while queue and backlog processing continues,” it added.

The company added that a comprehensive update is available under incident number “MO1550821” in the Microsoft 365 admin centre. Users can also track developments through its service status page.

It further stated that it has made additional progress toward recovery, with actions now completed across portions of affected infrastructure and traffic being gradually restored.

“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,” said Microsoft.

The mega outage, which began Thursday night, is linked to server health-check failures that caused affected servers to become unavailable. Microsoft initially attempted to address the problem by testing configuration changes and restarting affected servers. It also introduced an alternative health-check method, allowing some affected servers to return to service.

A prolonged Microsoft outage disrupted businesses, airlines and government operations across several countries on Friday, knocking out access to widely used services including Outlook, Teams and its AI assistant Copilot, as the technology giant struggled to restore normal operations hours after the disruption began.

The US-headquartered tech giant said the incident affected multiple Microsoft 365 products connected to its Exchange Online and email infrastructure.

–IANS

na/