Microsoft services such as Outlook and Teams were disrupted for more than 12 hours on Thursday and Friday — and counting — as the tech giant struggled to fix problems with some of its servers, hitting businesses and government agencies around the world that use the popular platforms.
In its latest update, Microsoft said efforts to improve serviceability were not progressing as expected. “We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances,” it said.
Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources, showed more than 25 000 reports of Outlook problems in the US at 9.30pm New York time (4.30am South African time on Friday). It also showed outages for several Microsoft services in the Asia-Pacific region, including India, Australia and Japan, early on Friday local time.
Organisations in South Africa were also affected. The worst of the outage began before the working day in South Africa, but users here may still face disruption on Friday morning.
They believe they are dealing with something in some ways similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike, where there is an update that has gone awry.
Australian minister Tony Burke
In a service health notice, Microsoft said features of Microsoft 365 services that depended on Exchange Online and email were affected, while elements that did not rely on Exchange Online remained functional. Exchange Online is the company’s cloud-based messaging platform that delivers email, calendar, contacts and tasks.
Australian minister for home affairs and cybersecurity Tony Burke said Microsoft believed it was not dealing with a cyberattack. “They believe they are dealing with something in some ways similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike, where there is an update that has gone awry,” Burke said at a press conference. “The impact that they are dealing with… is very much on email systems.”
The CrowdStrike malfunction of 2024 was one of the largest IT disruptions on record, hobbling technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports and highlighting the vulnerability of the world’s interconnected technologies. In South Africa, it knocked out Capitec’s card processing, ATMs, banking app and internet banking for several hours.
Microsoft had earlier pointed to a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, and said the problem was not driven by an increase in traffic. It then said the restored servers had remained stable and that it was shifting traffic to alternate routes wherever possible while streamlining the process of bringing the remaining affected servers back online.
“As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect,” Microsoft said in an earlier statement.
At 6pm New York time (1am in South Africa), Microsoft said it was seeing limited recovery as users gradually reconnected. — Harshita Mary Varghese, Anzar Mehraj, Katha Kalia, Preetika Parashuraman, Shubham Kalia and Stefgica Bikesh, with Jeffrey Dastin, (c) 2026 Reuters
