Cape Town – Businesses across South Africa have been left struggling to communicate after a major global Microsoft 365 outage disrupted access to Outlook and other workplace applications, affecting thousands of users.
The disruption, which began on Thursday, November 12, continued into Friday, leaving employees unable to access emails, calendars and other essential communication tools.
According to MyBroadband, the outage has affected businesses that rely on Microsoft’s services for their daily operations, with users reporting difficulties sending and receiving emails.
The disruption also affected Microsoft Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services.
Bloomberg reported that Microsoft was struggling to restore access to its flagship software more than 12 hours after the outage began.
Overwhelmed
The disruption attracted approximately 200,000 reports of problems across Microsoft’s services on outage-monitoring platform Downdetector, making it one of the company’s most significant outages in recent years.
South African users also reported widespread difficulties. The Citizen’s Network News reported that Downdetector South Africa recorded 874 reports relating to Microsoft 365 at 07:53 on Friday, while Outlook attracted 744 reports at 07:38.
Microsoft attributed the disruption to infrastructure problems that left some servers unexpectedly unavailable, placing additional pressure on the remaining systems.
In an update, the company said: “A core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding and contributes to the capacity loss.”
The company said it was working to identify the underlying cause of the increased traffic and restore affected services.
Available pathways
“We’re continuing to pursue all available pathways to restore service, as our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief,” Microsoft said in an earlier update.
Reuters reported that the outage had spread across Africa and the Asia-Pacific region, affecting government agencies and businesses in several countries.
Microsoft said it had observed some partial recovery in regions where it had implemented technical adjustments but was still reviewing additional measures to stabilise its infrastructure.
The company also said it was not aware of any malicious activity causing the disruption, suggesting that the incident was not the result of a confirmed cyberattack.
The outage has once again highlighted the dependence of businesses and institutions on cloud-based services and the potential consequences when critical digital infrastructure becomes unavailable.
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Compiled by Betha Madhomu
