India’s foreign exchange reserves rose by $2.49 billion to reach $719.547 billion in the week ended November 6, according to data released by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Friday.

This increase follows consecutive weeks of decline, during which the reserves had slipped from $722.3 billion in the week ended October 17 to $717.057 billion by October 30.

The uptick in reserves was primarily driven by a sharp rise in gold holdings, which surged by $2.205 billion to $104.796 billion during the week, the RBI data showed.

Foreign currency assets, which form the largest component of India’s forex reserves, also rose by $232 million to $591.350 billion.

These assets are influenced by changes in the value of non-US currencies such as the euro, pound, and yen that are held in the reserves.

India’s Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) with the International Monetary Fund climbed by $52 million to $18.610 billion, while the country’s reserve position with the IMF increased by $1 million to $4.791 billion.

In rupee terms, the country’s total foreign exchange reserves stood at Rs 67,58,986 crore as of November 6.

Notably, the weekly increase in dollar terms came even as the reserves declined by Rs 49,742 crore in rupee terms, as per the data.

India’s forex reserves had previously touched an all-time high of $785.7 billion in the week ended September 4, following significant foreign currency inflows through a special concessional swap scheme for diaspora deposits.

Meanwhile, earlier this month, the central bank eased the foreign exchange reporting requirements for small exporters and importers of services.

Under the amended Foreign Exchange Management (Export and Import of Goods and Services) Regulations, 2026, individual service exporters will be deemed to have submitted the Export Declaration Form (EDF) once they provide the required payment-related information to their authorised dealer bank for crediting the proceeds to their accounts.

For exporters other than resident individuals, the same treatment will apply if the inward remittance for the service is not more than Rs 10 lakh or its equivalent in foreign currency.

A prolonged Microsoft outage disrupted businesses, airlines and government operations across several countries on Friday, knocking out access to widely used services including Outlook, Teams and its AI assistant Copilot, as the technology giant struggled to restore normal operations hours after the disruption began.

The US-headquartered tech giant said the incident affected multiple Microsoft 365 products connected to its Exchange Online and email infrastructure.

Users across Asia and the United States reported difficulties accessing the services, with the disruption also spilling over into organisations that rely on Microsoft’s software for internal communication and customer support.

In its latest update, Microsoft said recovery efforts are ongoing across impacted infrastructure.

“We are seeing early signs of stabilisation, but service capacity has not yet returned to normal levels and health remains variable as traffic is carefully reintroduced,” the company said.

“Our primary mitigation path continues to focus on service stability and controlled recovery. Engineering teams are cycling affected infrastructure through traffic drain, restart, remediation, and staged return-to-service while monitoring closely. We are also evaluating additional mitigation options to improve recovery speed and consistency,” it added.

Microsoft said network and traffic-management actions remain in progress and it continues to prioritise backlog and queue health to preserve delayed mail during recovery.

“As part of this effort, we are extending the email timeout window to 48 hours to help protect delayed messages while service recovery continues,” the company said.

It added that it is not aware of any malicious activity causing the incident, and will share a full Post-Incident Report with root cause and defence-in-depth actions after recovery is complete.

The scale of the disruption was reflected in reports submitted to outage-tracking platform Downdetector, including for Copilot, Outlook and other services of the company.

The disruption also affected corporate schedules.

US-based industrial technology company Workhorse Group Inc. postponed its quarterly earnings conference call because of the outage.

Earlier in the day, domestic airlines — including IndiGo and Air India — also reported difficulties with their email systems, although flight operations remained unaffected.

Notably, Singapore’s Government Technology Agency confirmed that government email services were down and said it was working with Microsoft to resolve the problem.

In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said the country’s government IT infrastructure had also been affected and that authorities were “keeping a close eye on the developments.”

Japanese companies and institutions are turning to fax machines as the global Microsoft outage disrupts widely used services, including Outlook, Teams and AI software Copilot, forcing employees to reschedule meetings and putting routine business operations on hold, as per reports.

Microsoft faced severe outage across its platforms — 365, Outlook and Teams — as thousands of users across the globe, including India, on Friday morning were unable to access its services.

There were more than 1 lakh incidents of people reporting issues with Outlook at outage-tracking website downdetector.com.

The disruption also hit connectors used by OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s AI services.

“We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact,” Microsoft said in a statement, adding that it was providing updates in its admin center.

In its latest update, Microsoft attributed this incident to “a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable,” for reasons it did not explain.

Microsoft said it continues to investigate the outage.

In a post on X for users who can’t access the admin center, Microsoft said some of its infrastructure was experiencing “elevated load,” and that it was “redistributing connection traffic across our broader worldwide infrastructure to help balance the load.”

Its team has paused all deployments, is moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure, and is restarting affected servers to return them to service, the tech company said.

The company says its Defender XDR security system is also affected by the outage.

Earlier in the day, Microsoft said it had fixed a Teams disruption affecting users in North America and that the impact had been fully resolved.

The company later said the issue may also affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in other regions.

Microsoft faced a major outage in September, when a days-long outage hit Microsoft 365, its online productivity suite that includes Outlook.

The company had blamed a “core authentication configuration” issue that prevented users from accessing the service.