Technology analyst Arthur Goldstuck said the global Microsoft outage showed how much South African businesses depend on one tech provider. He said companies have little control when that provider’s systems break down.
The problems began on Thursday, 12 November, and carried on into Friday. Downdetector recorded a sharp rise in reports from users who could not reach Microsoft services, IOL reported.
“Outlook is the most visible casualty, but the problem originates in Microsoft’s Exchange Online infrastructure, which is connected to much of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem,” Goldstuck said.
Exchange Online runs Microsoft’s cloud email and calendar services. When it fails, other apps that need that data can also stop working.
Goldstuck said Copilot users struggled to use its AI chat and to pull information from emails, calendars and documents. Teams calendars and meeting bookings were hit, but most calls and normal chats still worked.
“That hardly helps when the rest is down,” he said. He added that security and admin tools were also affected.
Several South African organisations reported trouble. SARS said its technical teams were working directly with Microsoft. The City of Cape Town and the Central University of Technology warned users about problems with Microsoft services.
Goldstuck believes a network setup problem may have started a chain of failures across Microsoft’s servers. “As individual servers become unresponsive, the remaining servers have to handle more traffic and can become overwhelmed themselves,” he said.
He said this could explain why some servers went down again as traffic was restored. Speaking to East Coast Radio, he asked why backup systems did not take over when the problems started.
Microsoft has not confirmed this as the cause. The company said its investigation found problems with server availability and an overloaded process that sets up secure connections. It was also looking at a recent network change that lined up with the start of the outage.
Microsoft said it was not aware of any malicious activity. It said it would publish more detail in a report once the problem was under control.
On Friday, Microsoft said it was seeing good results after applying a patch to an authentication and routing part of its system. It said it was rolling out the fix to more servers, especially in regions starting their working day.
Goldstuck also pointed to the timing. For the quarter ended 30 September 2026, Microsoft reported revenue of $92.3 billion, up 19% from a year earlier. Net income rose 32% to $36.6 billion.
The company has offered a voluntary buyout plan for which about 60,000 staff are eligible. The Information reported that Microsoft’s Azure cloud unit was told to look for cost cuts of at least 20%.
“We cannot draw a direct connection between the workforce reductions and this outage, but it raises questions about the consequences of aggressive cost-cutting in an organisation responsible for so much of the world’s business technology,” Goldstuck said.
There is no evidence linking the staff measures or reported cost cuts to the technical failure, IOL reported.
“The irony is that Microsoft is making record profits from its customers’ increasing dependence on its services, yet those customers have almost no control when the infrastructure breaks down,” Goldstuck said.
Microsoft had not declared the incident resolved. It said it would keep working on the problem until all services were fully restored.
Source: this article is based on reporting by IOL Technology. Image: IOL Technology. Written with the help of AI and published by the Tzaneen Voice Technology desk. See our Editorial Standards.
Werner Jacobs covers technology for Tzaneen Voice. Werner reports on mobile networks, data prices, internet access, smartphones, apps, AI, cybersecurity and South African tech companies. Each story explains what a new product, price change or policy means for ordinary users in South Africa.