How India Inc navigated the Friday the 13th Microsoft outage

Many companies reported they shifted workflow to MS Teams, which worked fine, fortunately | Photo Credit: Dado Ruvic

Some called it “the curse of Friday the 13th”, while others called it a “freaky but fun Friday”. A global Microsoft outage brought corporate inboxes to a standstill across India, sparking reactions that ranged from frustration at slow workflow to celebrations about weekend arriving early.

On the task front, India Inc largely found workarounds to ensure that pressing assignments got done. Microsoft Teams helped most companies, even as Outlook and Copilot failed. A large financial GCC in Chennai said it routed all its internal correspondence with employees via Microsoft Teams.

Many companies reported they shifted workflow to MS Teams, which worked fine, fortunately. “The outage was a hassle though work was happening through WhatsApp calls and Teams. All approval emails will now have to wait for Monday,” said Anamika Sarma Iyer, Vice-President of Hyderabad based Digitide, an AI-first IT services company.

Banking operations were largely unaffected, and banks lost no opportunity in brand building. HDFC Bank even posted a cheeky message on its X handle: “Looks like your inbox is taking the day off. Your banking plans don’t have to... With HDFC Bank, stay on top of your banking needs, even when your emails aren’t.” Meanwhile, Axis Bank staffers posted a fun video of colleagues interacting with each other “old-school way” - face-to-face!

It was also business as usual at Zoho, which runs its own mail systems. Similarly, SaaS majors such as Freshworks and Kissflow and several new-age companies that use the Google Workspace said they had a normal day.

But it was far from normal at several MSME workplaces. A senior executive of a Bengaluru-headquartered IT services firm and a Microsoft Solutions partner said its operations were impacted by the outage. “We also deal with a lot of MSME customers, and several of them reached out to us for assistance, as most of them have next to no internal IT departments ,” said the executive.

A small payroll processing firm said it had asked its employees to work from home on Friday because of traffic restrictions due to the visit of the Prime Minister to Bengaluru to inaugurate the new metro line. “The Microsoft outage added to the woes. It was a Black Friday,” said the vice president of the firm.

The disruptions also impacted the hospitality sector, with InterContinental Hotels Chennai and ITC Hotels both taking to social media to inform customers that email-based customer service would be temporarily unavailable.

Meanwhile, many employees said the “no email day” was a boon. An employee at a consulting firm said that without constant email interruptions, productivity actually improved and she got a project done without distractions.

Published on November 13, 2026