Amid Outlook outage, PAL tells passengers to use other emails to avoid flight issues

MANILA – Philippine Airlines warned passengers on Friday that a global Microsoft outage could delay or block e-tickets and flight update notifications sent to Outlook, Hotmail and Live email addresses.

In a passenger advisory, the flag carrier urged travelers booking new flights to use alternate email providers and advised those flying in the coming days to update their contact details through the “Manage Booking” portal on its website.

Meanwhile, major Philippine financial institutions, including BDO, Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) and mobile wallet GCash, reported no operational impact from the disruption.

“We are business as usual and able to serve our clients through our branches, contact center, and digital channels,” BPI said in a statement.

Outage tracker Downdetector said the hours-long disruption hit Microsoft products, including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot, in 74 countries and territories across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa.

Microsoft attributed the connectivity problems to “elevated load” on its infrastructure and said initial repair efforts had stalled.

“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” Microsoft said on X, adding it was “identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity.”

In a separate post on X, the tech giant ruled out a cyberattack.

“We regret that today’s outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue,” it said, adding there was “no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity.”