Microsoft outage disrupts South African services
Email, Teams, and Copilot services were affected by a global technical issue on Thursday.
Microsoft apologised on Friday for a global outage that disrupted services in South Africa and 74 other countries. The company stated the disruption, which began on Thursday, was caused by a technical issue related to a network capacity upgrade, ruling out malicious cyber or AI activity. Services affected included Outlook email, Microsoft Teams, and the AI assistant Copilot.
In South Africa, the disruption hit businesses, municipalities, and universities, with the South African Revenue Service (SARS) warning taxpayers of potential access issues to Microsoft 365 applications. SARS confirmed its technical teams were engaging with Microsoft to resolve the problem, which stemmed from an overwhelmed process responsible for secure connections on affected servers. This issue was compounded by some servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable.
Microsoft reported a broad recovery and stability across its services on Friday, though full restoration was ongoing. The company has been working to restart affected servers and implement configuration changes. The outage highlighted the dependence of businesses and public services on Microsoft's infrastructure, prompting calls for national reviews of IT risk, particularly for small businesses that may lack workarounds for such failures.
Why it mattersSouth African businesses and government services experienced disruptions to essential communication and productivity tools due to a global Microsoft outage.