Microsoft’s Outage Hit IndiGo and Akasa Air Email Support, and Delhi Airport’s SpiceJet Warning Never Mentioned Microsoft

The Microsoft 365 outage that began on November 12, 2026, disrupted email support at IndiGo and Akasa Air on Friday, November 13, though neither airline reported a flight disruption. Several Indian outlets also blamed the outage for three SpiceJet cancellations at Delhi.

The only official word on SpiceJet tells a different story. Delhi Airport’s advisory put the disruption down to “operational challenges being faced by SpiceJet Airlines” and did not mention Microsoft at all.

What the airlines said

IndiGo posted a service advisory on X at 10:17 am India time on Friday. “Due to a global Microsoft service disruption, our email support services are currently impacted, and we may not be able to receive your emails,” the airline said, adding that all other support channels remained available.

IndiGo pointed urgent requests to 6E Skai, its digital assistant on the website and app. Akasa Air followed about an hour later, saying its email support was “experiencing delays” and that it might be unable to receive emails, and sent customers to its 24-hour call center and social media channels.

Air India said its flight operations “remain unaffected” and that it had rerouted emails, according to CNN, which collected the airline statements. Air India’s own X account went further with a one-liner: “Emails can wait.”

CNN reported that none of the carriers it tracked, which also included South Africa’s CemAir, reported flight disruptions. Gulf News found all 16 Air India and Air India Express flights scheduled out of Dubai from noon to the end of Friday listed as on time.

The SpiceJet cancellations

India.com and The Daily Jagran reported that SpiceJet cancelled three Friday morning departures from Delhi, to Pune, Leh and Mumbai, and delayed two more, to Darbhanga and Mumbai. Both tied the disruption to the Microsoft outage, but neither gave flight numbers or quoted SpiceJet.

Delhi Airport’s passenger advisory, issued at 10:05 am local time, reads: “Please note, due to operational challenges being faced by SpiceJet Airlines, some flights may be impacted.” It asked passengers to contact SpiceJet directly and gave no number of affected flights.

SpiceJet’s X timeline carried no post about the cancellations by early Friday afternoon India time. Earlier in the week, it reported intermittent connectivity problems with its customer care helpline on November 10, then said on the morning of November 12 that the numbers were working again, nearly 14 hours before Microsoft reported its first problems.

The airline was also dealing with trouble in Dubai. The news agency IANS reported that ground handler dnata suspended SpiceJet’s check-in there on November 12 over unpaid dues of more than 14 million UAE dirhams (about $3.8 million), and that SpiceJet cancelled four Dubai flights.

What Microsoft has said

Microsoft’s first status post, at 12:54 pm ET on November 12, said it was investigating problems reaching Exchange Online mailboxes “through multiple connection methods in the Americas.” Outage reports reached 74 countries and territories in about an hour, according to Downdetector, as quoted by CNN, with Indian reports jumping at 11:21 pm local time.

Overnight in the US, Microsoft described “sustained traffic management imbalances” and said some of its fixes were “not taking as expected.” At 2:44 am ET on Friday, it reported “positive results for service stability and increased capacity” and said it was widening those actions in pursuit of “persistent recovery.”

Charles Lamanna, a Microsoft executive vice president, said on X that there was “no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity,” CNN reported. Microsoft has said it will publish the root cause in a post-incident report once the problem is mitigated.

Why this was not a repeat of July 2024

Indian travelers have seen a Microsoft-linked outage reach the check-in counter before. On July 19, 2024, a faulty CrowdStrike security update crashed Windows computers worldwide, and Scroll reported that Delhi’s airport had no electronic check-in terminals available, so passengers were handed blank boarding cards to fill in by hand.

That failure hit the computers at the counters. This one hit a cloud office service, the email and Teams layer, and the airlines that spoke described closed inboxes rather than closed check-in desks.

Airline check-in and boarding typically run on departure control systems, specialized platforms separate from office email. An email outage mostly lands on customer service: refund requests, booking changes and messages from travel agents wait in a queue that nobody can open.

The exposure is still real, because one vendor’s fault reaches every airline that buys from it at once. Britain’s air traffic provider NATS learned a version of that lesson when a single software defect disrupted 2,000 UK flights.

For travelers flying in India on Friday, the practical advice is the airport’s own: check the airline’s app or website for flight status rather than waiting for an email. Anyone holding a SpiceJet ticket out of Delhi should contact the airline directly, as the advisory asks, to learn whether a flight is delayed or cancelled.