Ahmedabad: A global Microsoft outage disrupted hotel communications and business operations in Ahmedabad and at GIFT City entities on Friday, leaving users unable to send or receive emails. The disruption began on Thursday and continued into Friday. It affected Microsoft Outlook and other Microsoft 365 services, with users reporting difficulties accessing email and, in some cases, attending Microsoft Teams meetings.Two hotels in the city, Hyatt Regency Ahmedabad in Usmanpura and Hyatt Ahmedabad in Vastrapur, issued advisories on their social media accounts, informing guests that their email services were temporarily unavailable. Both hotels asked guests and partners to use helplines for bookings, inquiries and immediate assistance.Hyatt Regency Ahmedabad’s advisory said, “Our email communication service is temporarily unavailable due to an ongoing global Microsoft service disruption.”Cisco’s ThousandEyes, which monitors network disruptions worldwide, recorded Outlook outages across Ahmedabad and several other Indian cities, including Chennai, Indore and Bengaluru.“Several fintech firms in GIFT City, along with banks and global capability centres (GCCs) of major multinational corporations, faced an impact on operations in varying degrees. Businesses that depend on cloud-based systems for routine operations were affected,” said a source privy to the development.According to cybersecurity experts, this has implications across sectors, including hospitality, healthcare, insurance, banking, fintech and aviation, where email communication, digital documentation and online transactions are critical. Even airline ticket confirmations and insurance claims can face delays. The bigger concern is the dependence on online backups and the ability to access critical business data during such disruptions.The outage also affected employees at a consultancy firm in the ciy. “I could not send a single email today. Microsoft Teams still worked for me. However, some colleagues experienced difficulties joining meetings on the platform,” said an executive, requesting anonymity.ThousandEyes reported global availability issues affecting Microsoft 365 services. Its analysis identified connection resets, connection refusals, response timeouts, and HTTP server errors among the problems users encountered when trying to access Outlook and other Microsoft 365 applications.
