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Technology
Microsoft Outlook outage: Government engineers intervene as cyberattack ruled out
✍️ The Week
🗓 14 Nov 2026, 09:38 AM
👁 18
Microsoft Outlook experienced a widespread outage; government engineers have been deployed to assist, and officials say a cyberattack is not the cause.
The popular email and calendar service Microsoft Outlook went down early this week, affecting millions of users across India and globally. Users reported being unable to send or receive messages, and the Outlook web portal displayed error messages for several hours. The outage coincided with the start of the business day, prompting concerns among corporate and government offices that rely heavily on the platform.
In response, engineers from several Indian government agencies, including the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, were mobilised to work alongside Microsoft’s technical team. Their role is to provide on‑ground network diagnostics, assist with traffic routing, and help restore service continuity. The joint effort underscores the critical nature of Outlook for public sector communications.
Preliminary investigations have ruled out a malicious cyberattack as the trigger for the disruption. According to officials, the outage appears to stem from an internal software fault and a cascading failure in data centre operations. Microsoft has pledged to release a detailed post‑mortem report once the root cause is fully identified, while reassuring users that security was not compromised.
In response, engineers from several Indian government agencies, including the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, were mobilised to work alongside Microsoft’s technical team. Their role is to provide on‑ground network diagnostics, assist with traffic routing, and help restore service continuity. The joint effort underscores the critical nature of Outlook for public sector communications.
Preliminary investigations have ruled out a malicious cyberattack as the trigger for the disruption. According to officials, the outage appears to stem from an internal software fault and a cascading failure in data centre operations. Microsoft has pledged to release a detailed post‑mortem report once the root cause is fully identified, while reassuring users that security was not compromised.