Microsoft’s Outlook, Teams and Copilot were still down on Friday as one of the company’s worst outages stretched beyond 18 hours, disrupting communications for businesses and governments worldwide, including in South Africa.
Microsoft blamed server problems for the outage and said it was not aware of any malicious activity. In its latest update on Friday, it said it was seeing signs of stabilisation after applying fixes more broadly to achieve a lasting recovery of services.
The disruption hit government agencies in Australia, Japan and the US, caused problems at trading firms, delayed companies publishing their results and led airlines to warn customers of delayed communication.
South Africa wakes up to dead inboxes
The outage began at about 8pm South African time on Thursday, which spared most local organisations during working hours. But with service still not restored, reports surged after 5am on Friday as South Africans logged on for work, The Citizen reported. Downdetector South Africa logged 874 reports relating to Microsoft 365 at 7.53am and 744 for Outlook at 7.38am. Downdetector counts user complaints, not the number of affected accounts.
The City of Cape Town said its users might be unable to access, send or receive email, that Teams connections were intermittent and that some users were struggling to reach files on OneDrive. “At this stage, there is no confirmed timeline for the full restoration of services,” the city said.
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The South African Revenue Service warned taxpayers that the outage “may affect access to Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 applications”, and said its technical teams were “engaging directly with Microsoft”. It did not say whether eFiling or its other online services were affected.
The University of Cape Town’s ICT services department confirmed that Microsoft had advised users they could have difficulty connecting to multiple Microsoft 365 services, the Mail & Guardian reported.
On social media, many South Africans took it in their stride. “Microsoft is down and it’s Friday” was a common refrain among users treating the outage as an early start to the weekend.
Trades confirmed by fax
In Europe, stock exchange operator Euronext said its listing teams were having problems with email, while British insurer Aviva said it was putting backup plans in place for its earnings calls. Danish shipping company Maersk warned customers of delays to emails and updates.
US AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic said they had faced problems with their Microsoft connectors, while Indian airlines IndiGo, Akasa Air and Air India said their email support services had been affected.
The outage also disrupted fund management at Taiwanese securities firms, life insurers and investment trust companies. One of the companies went as far as cancelling a bond repurchase transaction, a source familiar with the situation told Reuters. Another Taiwanese financial company resorted to using fax to confirm trades, a second source said.
In the US, electric truck maker Workhorse Group rescheduled its results, due on Thursday, to 16 November, while Swiss luxury goods group Richemont, which also has a JSE listing, briefly delayed its interim results on Friday.
Reliability questions
It is the second disruption to hit Microsoft’s 365 services this year.
Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at trading platform eToro, said investors would probably live with the outage for now, because few customers can walk away from the Microsoft ecosystem overnight.
“The bigger worry is that this isn’t the first 365 outage this year, and if reliability starts to look like a recurring problem, it hands every IT department a reason to think twice before putting even more of their business in one provider’s hands,” he said.
Microsoft’s 365 services also went down in January this year and in October last year. Last month, it reported an outage of its Azure cloud platform that affected its suite of productivity software and a range of industries worldwide. The worst global IT failure of recent years, the CrowdStrike malfunction of 2024, knocked out Capitec’s card processing, ATMs and banking app for several hours.
If reliability starts to look like a recurring problem, it hands every IT department a reason to think twice before putting even more of their business in one provider’s hands.
eToro market analyst Josh Gilbert
Australian cyber security minister Tony Burke said Microsoft believed it was not dealing with a cyberattack. “The impact that they are dealing with… is very much on email systems,” he said.
Australia’s spy agency and federal police were among the organisations caught up in the outage on Friday.
The US House of Representatives said the outage had affected its users and that its engineers were working with Microsoft, while Japanese deputy chief cabinet secretary Masanao Ozaki told reporters that it was affecting the government’s information system infrastructure.
In a service health notice, Microsoft said features of Microsoft 365 that depended on Exchange Online and email were affected, while those that did not rely on Exchange Online still worked. Exchange Online is the company’s cloud-based messaging platform, which delivers email, calendar, contacts and tasks.
Reuters reported earlier that the disruption affected Microsoft services in 74 countries and territories. — Harshita Mary Varghese, Anzar Mehraj, Katha Kalia, Preetika Parashuraman, Shubham Kalia and Akanksha Khushi, Stefica Bikesh, Chris Thomas, Mrinmay Dey, Liang-sa Loh and Jeffrey Dastin, (c) 2026 Reuters, with additional reporting (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media
