Microsoft outage disrupts South African businesses, government, and universities

Microsoft's global Outlook outage disrupted businesses and public institutions in South Africa, with SARS, the City of Cape Town, and several companies reporting problems with essential services. The extent of impact on customer-facing operations was not immediately clear. The outage began Thursday evening South African time, affecting Microsoft's cloud services including Outlook, Teams, and Copilot. Downdetector recorded a sharp increase in complaints Friday morning, with Lesaka Technologies, Momentum Group, and Bestmed reportedly experiencing issues. Microsoft attributed the disruption to overwhelmed core processes on affected servers, causing them to stop responding. The company said its efforts to improve availability had not produced expected results and that it was identifying alternative measures, while noting no malicious activity was suspected.