A global Microsoft Outlook outage disrupted South African businesses and public bodies on Friday. SARS, the City of Cape Town and several companies reported problems with their email services.
The outage started on Thursday evening, South African time. It hit Microsoft’s cloud services, including Outlook, Teams and its Copilot AI assistant.
“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 update on Friday morning.
The South African Revenue Service said its technical teams were talking directly with Microsoft about the problem. The City of Cape Town also issued a notice about possible disruptions to its Microsoft services.
The Central University of Technology warned students and staff about disruptions too. It was not clear how much the problems affected services to the public.
Absa said some of its employees had trouble opening Microsoft apps from time to time. These included email and Copilot, the bank said.
FlySafair said it could not send or receive emails for a while. The airline gave customers other ways to contact it during the outage.
Lesaka Technologies and Momentum Group also reportedly had problems, according to MyBroadband. Medical scheme Bestmed warned its members that its email communication had been affected.
As people logged in for work on Friday morning, the outage tracking site Downdetector recorded a sharp rise in complaints. Many users also complained on social media.
Microsoft said features that depend on its Exchange Online service were running poorly. Users struggled to load inboxes, send or receive emails and open calendars.
The problems affected Outlook on the web, on desktop computers and in the mobile app. Some other Outlook functions also failed.
Basic Teams functions kept working, including video calls, meetings, group chats and normal channel messages. Teams features that rely on Outlook and Exchange Online were disrupted.
At first, Microsoft blamed high demand on parts of its systems in several regions. The company said this was causing connection errors.
Microsoft later said its investigation found that a core process on the affected servers was being overloaded. This made the servers stop responding and cut the capacity available to users.
The company said some servers had also become unavailable without warning. It admitted that its efforts to bring services back had not worked as expected.
Microsoft said it was looking for other ways to add capacity. It was also working to find the root cause of the traffic problems.
The company said it was not aware of any malicious activity behind the outage. It said it would share more details in a report once services were fully restored.
Source: this article is based on reporting by IOL. Image: IOL. Written with the help of AI and published by the Tzaneen Voice Business desk. See our Editorial Standards.
Anelisa Nkuna covers business and money news for Tzaneen Voice. Anelisa reports on the rand, fuel prices, interest rates, jobs, Eskom, Transnet, farming and company results. The aim is simple: explain what the numbers mean for household budgets, small businesses and workers in South Africa.