Microsoft, the technology and software giant, has disrupted big businesses in South Africa following a global infrastructure failure, exposing the country’s dependence on a handful of technology providers to keep everyday operations running.
Eskom, South Africa’s power utility, warned that its email services had been affected by a worldwide disruption to Microsoft Exchange. Domestic airline FlySafair said it could temporarily neither send nor receive emails, while Absa, one of South Africa’s largest banks, reported intermittent difficulties accessing Microsoft’s workplace applications.
“Eskom’s email services are currently impacted due to the worldwide disruption of the Microsoft Exchange service,” the utility said in a Friday post on X, directing customers to its telephone, WhatsApp, chatbot and USSD channels for assistance.
FlySafair similarly warned customers that the disruption to Microsoft 365 was affecting its email services, leaving it temporarily unable to send or receive messages. The airline advised customers to use its call centre and WhatsApp instead.
Absa said the disruption was affecting aspects of its Microsoft environment, with some employees experiencing intermittent difficulties accessing applications including email and Copilot.
“Microsoft is actively working on a resolution, and our tech teams are monitoring the situation closely,” the bank said.
The three organisations operate in vastly different sectors, but their experiences expose a growing vulnerability in South Africa’s digital economy: businesses, financial institutions and essential service providers increasingly depend on the same global technology infrastructure to keep their operations running. When that infrastructure fails, the disruption can spread across industries, affecting everything from internal communication to customer service and business continuity.
The outage, which hit South Africa on Thursday affected Microsoft’s widely used productivity and cloud services, including Outlook, Exchange Online, Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint and Copilot. The disruption extended beyond South Africa, affecting businesses, government institutions and educational organisations across multiple countries.
For South African organisations, the consequences extended beyond employees being unable to access their inboxes. Eskom had to redirect customers to alternative communication channels, while FlySafair asked passengers and other customers to use its telephone and WhatsApp services. Absa warned that the disruption was affecting access to tools used by its employees.
Other South African institutions also reported problems. The City of Cape Town said its Microsoft 365 environment, including email, Teams and OneDrive, had been affected. The South African Revenue Service, the country’s national tax authority, also issued an alert about the disruption to its services.
Microsoft’s recovery efforts highlighted the complexity of restoring services that support millions of users. In updates on its service health channels, the company said it was investigating elevated server loads and unexpected server unavailability, while attempts to redirect traffic away from affected infrastructure encountered further difficulties.
By Friday, Microsoft was reporting early signs of stabilisation and improvements in capacity as it worked to restart affected infrastructure.
“To help preserve delayed mail through this event, we’ve extended email timeout to 48 hours,” the company said in an update on Friday morning.
The incident raises questions about how prepared South African businesses are for prolonged disruptions to the technology platforms underpinning their operations.
Cloud services have become central to how organisations manage communications, store documents, collaborate and deliver services
The outage forced Eskom, FlySafair and Absa to redirect customers and employees to alternative communication channels while Microsoft worked to restore its services. For businesses that rely on cloud platforms to manage communications, documents and daily operations, the disruption highlighted the need for backup systems and business continuity plans.
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