New Delhi, Nov. 13 -- A worldwide outage of Microsoft's Outlook email service disrupted businesses, financial institutions and shipping companies on Friday, forcing millions of users to rely on traditional communication methods such as telephone calls, fax machines and Bluetooth to continue their operations.

The prolonged disruption also affected Microsoft Teams and Copilot, slowing down trading, administrative work and business communications across several countries.

The outage hit some of the world's largest institutions, including banks, stock market operators, insurers and shipping companies. Although most organisations reported that their core systems remained operational, the disruption exposed their dependence on a handful of te...