Thousands of South African workers and businesses have been left unable to access emails, calendars and workplace tools this morning (November 13) after a widespread global outage hit Microsoft 365 services.

According to Microsoft’s official service status page, the disruption – which began last night South African time – stems from problems with Exchange Online. This cloud server system powers business email and calendars for Microsoft Outlook.

While Microsoft initially flagged issues affecting users in the Americas on its official Microsoft 365 Status X account, it later confirmed that connectivity problems could affect users worldwide.

South African user reports surge

Local outage-tracking website Downdetector South Africa recorded an initial spike in complaints at around 20:00 yesterday, followed by a sharp surge after 05:00 today as South Africans logged on for work.

Before 08:00, Downdetector South Africa logged the following peak report volumes:

• Microsoft 365: 874 reports at 07:53
• Microsoft Outlook: 744 reports at 07:38
• Microsoft Teams: 79 reports at 07:53 (just below an earlier spike of 80 around 07:08)
• Microsoft Copilot: 45 reports at 20:23 yesterday, before rising again to 31 reports by 07:53 today

Downdetector figures reflect user-submitted error reports rather than the total number of affected accounts.

What is broken – and what still works

In its latest update at 07:46 SAST (05:46 UTC), Microsoft confirmed that any feature relying on Exchange Online is degraded, while independent tools remain functional.

• Outlook and email: Users may be unable to load inboxes or experience email delays across the Outlook web browser, desktop app and mobile devices.
• Microsoft Teams: Core features – including joining calls, video meetings, group chats and standard channel messages – continue to work normally. However, features tied to Outlook are failing, including scheduling meetings, sending calendar invites, viewing calendars, creating virtual events and creating or deleting private or shared channels.
• Microsoft 365 Copilot: Users may be unable to load Copilot Chat or receive responses, and the AI assistant cannot pull information from work emails, calendars or files.
• SharePoint and OneDrive files: Files stored directly in SharePoint Online remain accessible, though users may be unable to view their ‘recently used files’ list.
• Security and admin tools: IT administrators may struggle to load the Microsoft 365 admin centre, Microsoft Defender security portals or Microsoft Purview data-protection tools. Security features such as Safe Links, which scans web links inside messages for threats, are also failing, which may prevent users from opening links sent via email.

Knock-on effect on ChatGPT and Claude

The outage also disrupted third-party AI platforms, though their core systems did not go offline.

Both OpenAI (maker of ChatGPT) and Anthropic (maker of Claude) posted notices on their official technical status pages confirming errors with their Microsoft 365 ‘connectors’. In simple terms, connectors are optional plug-ins that link a user’s Microsoft account to an AI assistant so it can read emails, calendars or files. Because Microsoft’s servers were unreachable, those links failed even while ChatGPT and Claude themselves remained operational.

No sign of a cyberattack

Microsoft said its engineers are working to pinpoint the cause of an unexpected surge in server traffic and are gradually repairing and restarting affected backend servers to verify stability before rolling out broader fixes.

“As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident,” Microsoft said in a status update, adding that it will publish a full post-incident report explaining the root cause once services are fully restored.

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