Kenyan firms hit by global Microsoft outage disrupting emails, meetings

A global Microsoft outage has disrupted access to email and business communication services for several Kenyan firms, including banks, insurers, savings and credit co-operatives (Saccos), and government agencies. The disruption began late Thursday and affected Microsoft's video conferencing platform Teams, file-sharing service SharePoint, and artificial intelligence assistant Copilot. Other services with reported disruptions include OneDrive storage, Office for the web, and the company's Defender XDR security platform.

The outage left organisations unable to communicate with customers through their usual email channels and delayed services such as insurance claims processing. Business and consumer users were unable to access their inboxes, with some emails delayed by several hours. Standard Chartered Bank Kenya informed customers through text messages that their email services were currently unavailable and provided alternative contact information.

Insurer CIC Group also reported disruptions to its email services, attributing the problem to the global outage, and directed customers to its mobile application and telephone numbers to access services. The Communications Authority of Kenya and Stanbic Bank were among other organisations affected by the disruption. The government agency stated on X that its email services were temporarily unavailable due to the ongoing global Microsoft 365 outage.

Microsoft attributed the problem to elevated load on its infrastructure across multiple regions, contributing to connectivity errors. The tech company implemented fixes but was still working to restore services after some changes failed to deliver the expected improvement. Microsoft stated it was identifying alternative measures to increase capacity but did not provide a timeline for full restoration.

The outage spread from an initial impact reported in the United States and the Americas to multiple regions worldwide. By 3 pm EAT on Friday, outage-tracking website Downdetector was still reporting problems with Outlook and Microsoft 365 in Kenya. Microsoft 365 is the company's cloud-based subscription service that includes applications such as Outlook, Teams, and Word.

The disruption also had knock-on effects on other technology platforms. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, said it was investigating an issue affecting its connections to Microsoft's services, which had caused some tools to malfunction. Rival Anthropic, which owns the Claude chatbot, also reported problems linked to the outage.

The latest incident adds to a series of disruptions affecting Microsoft's productivity and cloud services over the past year. Microsoft experienced a disruption to its Azure cloud platform in October 2025 that affected its productivity software and services across several industries. Its Microsoft 365 suite also suffered a prolonged outage in September 2026, which the company attributed to a core authentication configuration problem.

Key points

• Microsoft outage disrupts email and meeting services for Kenyan firms
• Outage affects banks, insurers, Saccos, and government agencies
• Disruption caused by elevated load on Microsoft's infrastructure across multiple regions