Microsoft Outage Disrupts Outlook, Teams And Cape Town Services

A global Microsoft outage has disrupted Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services, with the City of Cape Town confirming its applications and services are affected.

The disruption began at approximately 20:00 SAST on Thursday, 12 November 2026, and continued into Friday morning, according to the supplied reports. Users in more than 70 countries, including South Africa, have been affected.

Microsoft reported progress after restarting affected infrastructure, but the supplied updates did not confirm full restoration.

Outlook And Exchange Online At The Centre Of Disruption

Users have reported difficulty accessing inboxes and sending or receiving email through Outlook and Exchange Online.

Other affected services include:

• Microsoft Teams.
• SharePoint Online.
• Microsoft Planner.
• Microsoft To Do.
• Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Administrator portals.

Reports also describe problems with connected file-sharing and security tools, although the supplied information does not identify every affected product.

Microsoft Reports Infrastructure Under Pressure

According to the supplied reports, Microsoft said a core infrastructure process became overwhelmed by an “elevated load”, alongside server configuration issues.

Servers stopped responding, reducing available capacity. The company said it did not believe the incident was a cyberattack.

Initial repair efforts did not deliver the expected improvement. Subsequent infrastructure restarts showed positive results on Friday morning, but disruption had lasted more than 12 hours.

City Of Cape Town Confirms Local Impact

The City of Cape Town issued a public notice confirming its services and applications were affected.

The supplied notice summary does not identify which individual municipal services were unavailable.

Disruption Reaches Public Services And Financial Markets

Downdetector recorded approximately 200 000 user reports worldwide, according to the supplied coverage.

Operational delays were reported at government ministries in Japan, immigration services in New Zealand, UK NHS services, schools and financial trading desks across Asia.

The reports describe a wide-reaching interruption to workplace communication and administration. The position remained unresolved in the Friday morning updates supplied for this article.

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