Microsoft outage: Ola’s Bhavish Aggarwal bats for stringent data localisation norms

Ride-hailing firm Ola’s founder Bhavish Aggarwal who has previously been vocal against the dominance of foreign companies like Microsoft and Google in India batted for data localisation in the context of Microsoft’s global outage. Currently, India’s data protection law (which is yet to be enforced) allows cross-border data flow except to countries blacklisted by the Centre.

“The government needs to recognise the risk of our data residing globally and bring more stringent data localisation norms and action to address these risks,” he said, in a post on microblogging site X (formerly Twitter).

Since 80% of India’s data currently is stored outside India, users won’t be able to do anything, he argued.



“Outages are momentary with no deliberate intent to cause harm. Can happen occasionally to any company. But it represents an outcome that could also happen due to deliberate action by bad actors and intentions,” he said.

The Ola chief has been advocating for Made-in-India technologies and even migrated from Google Maps to his in-house Ola Maps. He invited developers to join at a subsidised cost and claimed that unlike Google his company charges in rupees and not in dollars.

Google on Friday slashed its Maps pricing by 70% and allowed developers to pay in rupees. Aggarwal also migrated from Google Cloud to Ola’s cloud platform. Microsoft's products are used in many sectors of the Indian economy, including businesses, schools, and government organisations.

As of 2022, Microsoft Azure had a 30% market share in India's cloud services. Experts argued that the outage was so widespread due to the large share that firms like Microsoft have on enterprise networks in India and globally.

His comments come amid a global Microsoft outage which brought the world to a standstill with multiple services and products across domains including airlines, hotels and other office establishments being impacted globally.

Windows users across the globe faced a ‘blue screen of death’ error.

Microsoft later in the day said that the underlying cause for the outage of its 365 apps and services has been fixed, but the residual impact of cybersecurity outages are continuing to affect some customers.