The official email services of the Civil Aviation Authority of Sri Lanka have been disrupted since Friday morning because of the technical fault affecting Microsoft 365, the regulator has said. It is the first Sri Lankan institution reported to have been knocked offline by the global outage.
The Authority’s official email has been down since the morning of the 13th as a result of a technical problem associated with the Microsoft 365 service, Hiru News reported at 4.46 p.m. on Friday, citing the Authority.
CAASL has asked aviation sector stakeholders, government institutions and members of the public with urgent inquiries or official business to reach the relevant officers directly, using their mobile numbers or official landline numbers, for as long as the disruption lasts.
What the Authority says is not affected
The Authority states that its operational activities and services are not disrupted and are continuing without interruption. The fault is confined to official email.
That distinction matters for an aviation regulator, and it is worth being precise about what the filing does and does not claim. CAASL’s remit covers licensing, airworthiness certification, aviation safety regulation and air navigation oversight. The statement says those functions continue; it does not go into which systems they run on, or why email alone was affected.
The Authority says it will issue further notice as soon as official email is restored.
The wider outage
The disruption is a local consequence of the Microsoft failure that took out Outlook, Teams and Copilot for tens of thousands of users from Thursday. Microsoft attributed the fault to servers that stopped passing their own automatic health checks, and by the time it reported recovery under way the outage had affected users in 74 countries.
Outlook is the email client in the Microsoft 365 suite, so an organisation that has moved its official mail to Microsoft’s cloud loses it when that service fails — which is what the Authority describes.
Not reported
The filing does not name any CAASL official, give the mobile or landline numbers the Authority is directing people to, or say how long the Authority expects the disruption to last. It does not say whether email was lost or merely inaccessible, whether any aviation safety notification was delayed, or whether other Sri Lankan government institutions on Microsoft 365 are affected.
Nothing states when the Authority last had a working email service, or whether it has a fallback system for the formal notices — airworthiness directives, NOTAM-related correspondence — that would normally go by email.
A second verified newsroom is understood to have carried this statement, but Ada Derana has returned HTTP 403 to this desk on every route for more than a week and could not be fetched or dated, so this report rests on the Hiru filing alone.
Note on initials: CAASL here is the Civil Aviation Authority of Sri Lanka. It is a different body from the Consumer Affairs Authority, which this desk also abbreviates CAA.
