Microsoft outage hits South African businesses, government services and universities - IOL

Microsoft's global Outlook outage has disrupted businesses and public institutions in South Africa, with SARS, the City of Cape Town and several companies reporting problems with essential services.

As Microsoft's global outage continued to disrupt businesses and organisations around the world, its effects were also being felt in South Africa, with several companies and public institutions reporting problems with essential services.

The South African Revenue Service (SARS) said its technical teams were engaging directly with Microsoft over the incident, while the City of Cape Town and the Central University of Technology issued notices about potential or actual disruptions to their Microsoft-based services. The extent to which these interruptions have affected customer-facing operations and service delivery was not immediately clear.

On Friday morning, local outage-monitoring platform Downdetector recorded a sharp increase in complaints. Lesaka Technologies and Momentum Group have reportedly experienced problems, while medical scheme Bestmed warned customers that its email communications had been affected, according to MyBroadband. 

The big outage began on Thursday evening (South African time), disrupting Microsoft's cloud-based services, including Outlook, Teams and its Copilot artificial intelligence (AI) assistant.

As South Africans logged in for work on Friday morning, local outage-monitoring platform Downdetector recorded a sharp increase in complaints, and many users took to social media platforms to complain about the outage.

On Friday, Microsoft said features relying on its Exchange Online cloud-based service were experiencing degraded performance. As a result, users struggled to load inboxes, send or receive emails, access calendars or use certain functions across Outlook's web, desktop and mobile applications.

While core Teams functions such as video calls, meetings, group chats and standard channel messages remained available, features dependent on Outlook and Exchange Online were disrupted.

The company initially attributed the disruption to elevated demand on parts of its infrastructure across multiple regions, which it said was contributing to connectivity errors.

Microsoft 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.

It also said some servers had become unexpectedly unavailable.

In an update issued by the tech giant on Friday morning, Microsoft acknowledged that its efforts to improve service availability were not producing the expected results. It said that alternative measures to increase capacity were being identified.

“We’re continuing to pursue all available pathways to restore service, as our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief,” the company said.

The company said it was also working to identify the underlying cause of the traffic problems and would provide more detail in a post-incident report once the disruption had been resolved.

Microsoft said it was not aware of any malicious activity causing the incident.