A global Microsoft 365 outage disrupted Outlook and other services on Thursday, with users in South Africa also affected. Microsoft was still working to restore services on Friday, and some customers continued to experience problems as recovery progressed.
The disruption affected Microsoft services connected to Exchange Online, the company’s email platform. Some people could not access their mailboxes or send and receive messages. Teams and Microsoft’s Copilot were also affected, although some Teams features continued working for some users.
Recovery remains uneven
Downdetector recorded almost 140,000 reports of Outlook problems from 74 countries around the outage’s peak. That is a count of reports submitted to the monitoring service, not a confirmed tally of people affected.
Microsoft said it had made progress in restoring service, with availability and email delivery improving across more of its European infrastructure. It also reported improvements in Asia-Pacific and North America, but warned that some users could still face intermittent issues. The outage had lasted more than 18 hours by then.
When checked on Friday, Microsoft’s public service health page still listed service degradation for Microsoft 365 business and consumer products. The incident listing showed an update time of 00:56 UTC.
Microsoft has not confirmed the root cause. The Associated Press reported that the company said it had no indication the outage was caused by malicious activity. The recovery work included server adjustments, but Microsoft said those changes had not yet produced a sustained recovery.
South African impact remains unclear
Users in South Africa were affected as the disruption stretched into African and Asia-Pacific business hours. Its report did not give a local user count or identify South African organisations affected.
That leaves the local scale uncertain.
The reported impact shows the outage reached South Africa, but the available information does not establish how widely it disrupted work here or which services were most affected.
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