Kenyan banks turned to WhatsApp and call centres on Friday after a global Microsoft outage cut off their email, forcing several of the country’s biggest lenders to reroute customer queries.
Equity Bank and UBA Kenya asked customers to call or use WhatsApp. Stanbic Bank Kenya, part of South Africa’s Standard Bank Group, directed customers to its Voice Branch call centre or their relationship managers. Standard Chartered Bank Kenya told customers by text that its email service was unavailable.
Loop, NCBA Group’s digital bank, went further, saying both its email and in-app support channels were down and directing customers to phone lines and social media. None of the notices mentioned problems with payments.
Insurers also felt the strain, as Old Mutual Kenya apologised to customers after losing access to email. APA Insurance lost email as well as Microsoft’s SharePoint and OneDrive, according to an email seen by TechCabal.
The disruption shows how heavily Kenya’s financial industry relies on a single foreign cloud provider for the basic tools of daily operations, even as lenders move almost all customer business to digital channels.
Microsoft first said it was investigating mailbox problems shortly before 1 PM New York time on Thursday. That was 9 PM in Nairobi, the hour when Old Mutual’s Kenyan unit says its email went down.
Microsoft blamed a large number of servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable, which pushed extra load onto the rest of its infrastructure, and said it saw no sign of a cyberattack.
The failure spread to 74 countries and territories in about an hour, according to Downdetector. By Friday morning, Microsoft said service capacity had not yet returned to normal levels. It has given no estimate for full recovery.
UBA Kenya named Microsoft Outlook as the cause and offered customers phone lines, a WhatsApp number and their relationship managers.
“We wish to inform you that due to a global service disruption affecting Microsoft Outlook, our email services are temporarily unavailable. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause,” UBA Kenya told its customers in a text on Friday.
Equity cited “a global service disruption” without naming Microsoft and asked customers to call or message it on WhatsApp. In a text to customers, Standard Chartered said only that its email was unavailable. None of the notices mentioned payment or mobile banking issues.
The exposure reaches well beyond Kenya. Equity serves 23.3 million customers and processes 89.7% of transactions on digital platforms. London-based Standard Chartered owns 73.89% of its Kenyan unit. Nigeria’s UBA operates in 20 African countries as well as in the US, the UK, France, and the United Arab Emirates.
Companies outside finance were hit too. Securex Agencies, a Nairobi-based security company founded in 1970, told clients to use its phone line and social media pages for “urgent security-related matters”. A travel agency told its clients it could not access its email due to the outage.
Friday’s failure is the latest in a run of Microsoft 365 disruptions this year. Outages occurred in January and July, and a late-August incident locked thousands of users worldwide out of their mailboxes.
Kenya has few local alternatives because a $1 billion Microsoft and G42 data centre, meant to host an Azure cloud region for East Africa, stalled when the government refused the payment guarantees the companies sought.
Kenyan officials have since said the project remains on track. East Africa’s live data-centre load stood at about 30 megawatts in 2025, according to an industry estimate.
A local data centre would not necessarily have shielded Kenyan users, because Microsoft runs its email and file services on shared global infrastructure. But the outage showed how few fallback options Kenyan companies have when that infrastructure breaks.
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