What went wrong with Microsoft? Local expert explains global outage hitting SA - IOL

Microsoft's global outage disrupted Outlook, Teams and other services, leaving South African businesses and workers struggling to access essential tools as the company scrambled to restore systems.

Microsoft's global outage has caused significant disruption for South African businesses and workers, with hundreds of local users having reported problems accessing Outlook and other services as the service failure continued into Friday.

The outage began on Thursday evening, in South African time, affecting 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.

Arthur Goldstuck, a local tech publisher and author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to AI, believes that 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 said 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 such as Outlook and OneDrive. He suggested that a failure involving the underlying server settings could have triggered a wider disruption across connected systems.

“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 told East Coast Radio.

He questioned why backup infrastructure had not been able to take over when problems emerged.

“One would expect [for] there to be backups that allow the servers to kick in immediately when it fails in one place and then comes up again in another place,” he said.

“Somehow, the way they’ve set up their systems hasn’t allowed for that, and when they’ve try to bring back their systems they fail again. So, it’s something at the heart of the Microsoft servers that is failing and continuing to fail.”

Microsoft said features relying on its Exchange Online cloud-based service were experiencing degraded performance. This meant users could struggle 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, users experienced disruptions to dependent features, including meeting scheduling and calendar invitations.

Microsoft also reported problems affecting Copilot Chat, particularly its ability to retrieve information from work emails, calendars and files. SharePoint documents remained accessible, although some users experienced difficulties accessing recently viewed files.

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.

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.