Africa: Global Microsoft Outages Affecting African Users

Several news agencies are reporting a worldwide Microsoft outage today, and now African users are being affected.

Microsoft users are unable to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services, while the company’s cloud services outage grounded planes in the U.S.

It’s unclear if the outage is linked to the March 2024 problems caused by damaged undersea fiber optic cables in West Africa.

This is part of what Microsoft’s cloud status page shared:

Title: Users may be unable to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services

User impact: Users may be unable to access various Microsoft 365 apps and services.

More info: Users may notice that some of the affected users are seeing relief as we continue to mitigate the impact.

Impacted services may include but are not limited to the following:
– PowerBI: Users may notice that their service is in read-only mode while we address impact.
– Microsoft Fabric: Users may notice that their service is in read-only mode while we address impact.
– Microsoft Teams: Users may be unable to leverage Microsoft Teams functions including presence, group chats, and user registration.
– Microsoft 365 admin center: Admins may be intermittently unable to access the Microsoft 365 admin center and any action may be delayed if accessible.
– Microsoft Purview: Users will see a delay in events being processed in Microsoft Purview.

Current status: We’re continuing to progress on our mitigation efforts for the affected Microsoft 365 apps and services. We still expect users to see remediation as we address residual impact.

Scope of impact: This issue may be impacting any user attempting to use various Microsoft 365 apps and services.

Start time: Thursday, July 18, 2024, at 9:56 PM UTC

Preliminary root cause: A configuration change in a portion of our Azure backend workloads, caused interruption between storage and compute resources which resulted in connectivity failures that affected downstream Microsoft 365 services dependent on these connections.

Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 services are also affected.

Downdetector reported a sharp increase in South Africans reporting Microsoft 365 issues from around 7am this morning. Capitec Bank users also reported outage issues.