A Microsoft 365 outage that lasted more than 24 hours disrupted email and Teams for users at the South African Revenue Service (SARS), the City of Cape Town and at least five banks in Kenya, before Microsoft said on 14 November it had fixed the fault.
For African organisations that run their staff email, meetings and file storage on Microsoft’s cloud, the incident showed how a fault far outside the continent can stop routine customer contact. Several Kenyan banks fell back on phone lines, WhatsApp and SMS to reach customers while their email was down.
How the Microsoft outage hit South Africa and Kenya
The disruption began late on Thursday 12 November. Microsoft first flagged technical issues just before 1pm US Eastern time, which is about 8pm in South Africa, as TechCentral reported, citing Reuters. That timing spared most South African organisations during working hours, but complaints surged after 5am on Friday as people logged on.
Between 7.38am and 7.53am on Friday, Downdetector South Africa logged 744 reports about Outlook and 874 about Microsoft 365, according to the same report. These figures count user complaints, not affected accounts.
SARS published a notice on 13 November warning that the outage “may affect access to Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 applications”. The tax authority said its technical teams were working directly with Microsoft. The notice did not say whether eFiling or other online tax services were affected.
The City of Cape Town told residents and staff that Outlook users might be unable to access, send or receive email, that Teams connections could be intermittent and that some users might not be able to open files on OneDrive. The city said the problem sat with Microsoft’s global infrastructure, not with users’ devices or network connections, and that no timeline had been confirmed for a full fix.
Richemont, which has a listing on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, briefly delayed its interim results on Friday, TechCentral reported.
In Kenya, banks, insurers, savings and credit co-operatives (Saccos) and government agencies were hit, according to Business Daily. TechCrier reported that Equity Bank sent customers to phone calls and WhatsApp, UBA Kenya named Outlook as the source of the problem, Stanbic Bank Kenya pointed customers to its call centre and relationship managers, and Standard Chartered Kenya told customers by SMS that email was unavailable. Loop, the digital bank of NCBA Group, said its email and in-app support were down. According to TechCrier, none of the banks’ notices reported problems with payments or mobile banking.
What Microsoft said about the cause
Microsoft blamed server problems and said it was not aware of any malicious activity, according to Reuters reporting carried by TechCentral. Its service health notice said Microsoft 365 features that depend on Exchange Online, its cloud email service, were affected, while features that do not rely on it kept working.
On Friday the company apologised on X. “We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners,” Microsoft said, as reported by CBS News.
Early on Saturday 14 November, the Microsoft 365 Status account posted: “We have completed our efforts to address the underlying issue of the incident”. The post added that service had been restored for the remaining affected customers and regions, CBS News reported.
Charles Lamanna, executive vice president at Microsoft, said in a social media post that Microsoft would publish a full post-mortem, according to CBS News.
Context: Africa’s reliance on global cloud services
The outage was large by any measure. Downdetector, owned by Ookla, logged more than 7.4m reports worldwide, Nairametrics reported. Mario De Cicco of Morningstar DBRS estimated global insured losses at $300m to $500m, according to the same report, which cited Reuters.
It was also not the first such failure this year. TechCentral noted that this was the second Microsoft 365 disruption of 2026. The report recalled that the 2024 CrowdStrike software fault knocked out Capitec’s card processing, ATMs and banking app in South Africa for several hours.
Local cloud capacity in East Africa is still being built. TechCrier noted that a proposed $1bn data centre project by Microsoft and G42, meant to support an Azure cloud region for East Africa, had stalled over government payment guarantees, although officials say it remains on track. A local region would not by itself have prevented a fault in Microsoft’s global email service, but it is part of the wider debate about where African data and workloads sit.
What happens next
Microsoft has said it will publish a full post-mortem of the incident. Organisations in South Africa and Kenya that lost email during a working day will be able to use it to check what failed and whether their own fallback plans worked.
