Indian billionaire Sridhar Vembu's Zoho pitched as Microsoft backup after global outage

Indian billionaire Sridhar Vembu's software company Zoho Corp. has been pitched as a backup for Indian businesses by Biocon Ltd. founder Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, after a global Microsoft Corp. outage knocked out Outlook, Teams and other workplace tools for millions of users.

"This is an unexpected opportunity for @Zoho to be an alternate backup MIS for India Inc given such unforeseen events," Mazumdar-Shaw wrote on X on Nov. 13, tagging the company and Vembu. Asked why she had singled out Zoho, she said it was the only homegrown system she knew of.

The disruption began on Nov. 12 and hit Outlook, Teams, Copilot and Microsoft 365. Outage tracker Downdetector logged nearly 130,000 reports of Outlook problems shortly after 1 p.m. New York time, with users in more than 70 countries, including India, affected. Microsoft said on Nov. 14 that all of its products were working again and that the backlog of email had been cleared.

Replies to Mazumdar-Shaw's post were split. Some users backed a bigger role for Indian software, while others questioned whether Zoho could handle the load and said moving large companies off Microsoft would be hard. Jason Ader, an analyst at William Blair, said he did not expect the outage to change Microsoft's competitive position in the near term because of the cost of ripping out embedded workflows, though it could make some customers more open to alternatives over time.

Government business

Zoho, which Vembu co-founded with Tony Thomas in 1996, already runs a large share of India's official email. About 1.27 million government email accounts across ministries have moved to a Zoho-based platform, including about 745,000 belonging to central government employees, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology told Parliament last December. The migration was handled by the National Informatics Centre.

The Chennai-based company has leaned on that "swadeshi," or homegrown, push. In October last year, Union ministers publicly endorsed Zoho's office software and its Arattai messaging app as alternatives to foreign services, and Home Minister Amit Shah moved to Zoho Mail. In June, the Indian Army signed a memorandum of understanding with Zoho to support its digital modernization.

The outage gave Zoho a talking point at a difficult moment for the business. Vembu said in October that Zoho would not raise pay this year and would try to avoid mass layoffs, describing the outlook for software jobs as grim as artificial intelligence reshapes the industry.

A rural founder

Vembu, who grew up in a farming family in Tamil Nadu and studied at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and Princeton University, built Zoho without venture capital. He stepped down as chief executive in January 2025 to become chief scientist, focusing on research and development, and runs much of the company's work from Tenkasi, a rural district in southern Tamil Nadu.

Forbes counts Vembu and his siblings, who share ownership of the privately held company, among India's richest people. Mazumdar-Shaw, who built Biocon into one of India's largest drugmakers, is also a billionaire.