Microsoft reports outage; services restored after few hours
New Delhi, Jan 25: Microsoft's online services, including Teams and Outlook, faced an outage for a few hours on Wednesday and the issues were fixed later, with the technology major saying it is monitoring the recovery across the services.
Thousands of users across the globe, including from India, reported issues with various services as the company had reported 'service degradation' for a number of its Microsoft 365 services, including Teams and Outlook.
The cloud computing platform of Microsoft Azure also faced an outage.
According to the network outage monitoring platform Down Detector, the complaints about Microsoft services outage started around 1 pm IST.
The company in its service status update for Azure Networking said that its customer experienced issues with networking connectivity, manifesting as network latency and/or timeouts when attempting to connect to Azure resources between 7.05 coordinated universal time (UTC) or 12.35 PM IST and 9.45 UTC or 3.15 PM IST.
"We identified a recent change to WAN (wide area network) as the underlying cause and have rolled back this change. Networking telemetry shows recovery from 9.00 UTC (or 2.30 PM IST) onwards across all regions and services, with the final networking equipment recovering at 09.35 UTC (3.05 PM IST).
"Most impacted Microsoft services automatically recovered once network connectivity was restored, and we worked to recover the remaining impacted services," the update on the Azure status page said.
Services were back after about a few hours, but some customers continued to report problems in accessing certain services, as per Microsoft's dashboard.
Microsoft identified a potential networking issue behind the glitch in Microsoft 365 services and said that it has rolled back a network change that it believed was causing an impact.
"We're monitoring the service as the rollback takes effect. We've isolated the problem to networking configuration issues, and we're analysing the best mitigation strategy to address these without causing additional impact," according to a tweet from Microsoft 365 official account.
The official handle of Microsoft 365 Status tweeted that it continues to monitor the recovery across the service, and some customers are reporting mitigation.
"We're also connecting the service to additional infrastructure to expedite the recovery process," it said.
The Service Health Status dashboard of Microsoft showed that Microsoft 365 was back and running.
The Azure status page update mentioned that it will follow up in 3 days with a preliminary Post Incident Report (PIR), which will cover the initial root cause and repair items.
"We'll follow that up 14 days later with a final PIR where we will share a deep dive into the incident," the update said.
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Texas halts H-1B visas at state universities, agencies; to affect Indians
Houston (US) (PTI): Texas Governor Greg Abbott has ordered state agencies and public universities to immediately halt new H-1B visa petitions, tightening hiring rules at taxpayer-funded institutions, a step likely to impact Indian professionals.
The freeze will remain in effect through May 2027.
The directive issued on Tuesday said that the state agencies and public universities must stop filing new petitions unless they receive written approval from the Texas Workforce Commission.
The governor's order, in a red state that is home to thousands of H-1B visa holders, comes as the Trump administration has initiated steps to reshape the visa programme.
“In light of recent reports of abuse in the federal H-1B visa programme, and amid the federal government’s ongoing review of that programme to ensure American jobs are going to American workers, I am directing all state agencies to immediately freeze new H-1B visa petitions as outlined in this letter,” Abbot said.
Institutions must also report on H-1B usage, including numbers, job roles, countries of origin, and visa expiry dates, the letter said.
US President Donald Trump on September 19 last year signed a proclamation ‘Restriction on entry of certain non-immigrant workers’ that restricted the entry into the US of those workers whose H-1B petitions are not accompanied or supplemented by a payment of USD 1,00,000.
The H1-B visa fee of USD 1,00,000 would be applicable only to new applicants, i.e. all new H-1B visa petitions submitted after September 21, including those for the FY2026 lottery.
Indians make up an estimated 71 per cent of all approved H-1B applications in recent years, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), with China in the second spot. The major fields include technology, engineering, medicine, and research.
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is the second-highest beneficiary with 5,505 approved H-1B visas in 2025, after Amazon (10,044 workers on H-1B visas), according to the USCIS. Other top beneficiaries include Microsoft (5,189), Meta (5,123), Apple (4,202), Google (4,181), Deloitte (2,353), Infosys (2,004), Wipro (1,523) and Tech Mahindra Americas (951).
Texas public universities employ hundreds of foreign faculty and researchers, many from India, across engineering, healthcare, and technology fields.
Date from Open Doors -- a comprehensive information resource on international students and scholars studying or teaching at higher education institutions in the US -- for 2022-2023 showed 2,70,000 students from India embarked on graduate and undergraduate degrees in US universities, accounting for 25 per cent of the international student population in the US and 1.5 per cent of the total student population.
Indian students infuse roughly USD 10 billion annually into universities and related businesses across the country through tuition and other expenses – while also creating around 93,000 jobs, according to the Open Doors data.
Analysts warn the freeze could slow recruitment of highly skilled professionals, affecting academic research and innovation.
Supporters say the directive protects local jobs, while critics caution it could weaken Texas’ competitiveness in higher education and research.
The order comes amid broader debate in the US over skilled immigration and state-level interventions in federal programmes.
H-1B visas allow US companies to hire technically-skilled professionals that are not easily available in America. Initially granted for three years, these can be extended for another three years.
In September 2025, Trump had also signed an executive order ‘The Gold Card’, aimed at setting up a new visa pathway for those committed to supporting the United States; with individuals who can pay USD 1 million to the US Treasury, or USD 2 million if a corporation is sponsoring them, to get access to expedited visa treatment and a path to a Green Card.
