Microsoft 365 Outage Disrupts South African Users

A global Microsoft 365 outage has disrupted services for South African users, with hundreds reporting problems accessing Outlook, Teams, and Copilot. The outage began on Thursday evening, South African time, and continued into Friday. Local outage-monitoring platform Downdetector recorded a sharp increase in complaints, and many users took to social media to complain about the outage.

The outage affected Microsoft's cloud-based services, including Outlook, Teams, and Copilot, a artificial intelligence assistant. Microsoft said features relying on its Exchange Online cloud-based service were experiencing degraded performance, making it difficult for users to load inboxes, send or receive emails, access calendars, or use certain functions across Outlook's web, desktop, and mobile applications.

Local analyst Arthur Goldstuck believes the problem may lie deep within Microsoft's server infrastructure. He questioned why backup systems have not been able to prevent the failure from spreading across its services and regions. Goldstuck explained that Microsoft's services rely on powerful servers housed in large data centres around the world, which are intended to provide customers with reliable access to applications.

Goldstuck suggested that a failure involving the underlying server settings could have triggered a wider disruption across connected systems. He said, "But if the basic settings of the servers at the heart of the system fail and that failure rolls onto all the other systems, then it takes down the entire servers." Goldstuck questioned why backup infrastructure had not been able to take over when problems emerged.

Microsoft initially attributed the disruption to elevated demand on parts of its infrastructure across multiple regions, which it said was contributing to connectivity errors. The company later said its investigation had found that a core process on affected servers was becoming overwhelmed, causing them to stop responding and reducing available capacity.

Microsoft acknowledged that its efforts to improve service availability were not producing the expected results and said it was working to identify the underlying cause of the traffic problems. The company said it was not aware of any malicious activity causing the incident and would provide more detail in a post-incident report once the disruption had been resolved.

The outage caused significant disruption for South African businesses and workers, with many users experiencing difficulties accessing Microsoft services. Microsoft said it was working to restore services and was pursuing all available pathways to resolve the issue. The company will provide a post-incident report once the disruption has been resolved.

Key points

• Microsoft 365 outage disrupts Outlook, Teams, and Copilot for South African users
• Outage caused by problems with Microsoft's server infrastructure
• Microsoft working to restore services and identify underlying cause of issue