Kenyan firms hit by global Microsoft outage disrupting emails, meetings

By  Dennis Musau

Correspondent

NMG

What you need to know:

• Businesses and users were unable to access their inboxes, with some emails delayed by several hours.
• The outage is among the most disruptive incidents to hit the US tech giant's cloud-based services.

Kenyan banks, insurers, savings and credit co-operatives (Saccos) and government agencies have been hit by a global Microsoft outage that disrupted access to email and other business communication services.

The disruption began late Thursday and has affected Microsoft's video conferencing platform Teams, file-sharing service SharePoint and artificial intelligence assistant Copilot.

Other services with reported disruptions on Friday include OneDrive storage, Office for the web and the company's Defender XDR security platform.

It left organisations unable to communicate with customers through their usual email channels and delayed services such as insurance claims processing.

Business and consumer users were unable to access their inboxes, with some emails delayed by several hours.

The outage is among the most disruptive incidents to hit the US tech giant's cloud-based services, which are used by businesses and governments globally.

“Our email services are currently unavailable. You may reach us through your relationship manager or our contact centre phone numbers,” Standard Chartered Bank Kenya told customers through text messages on Friday.

Insurer CIC Group also reported disruptions to its email services, attributing the problem to the global outage. It directed customers to its mobile application and telephone numbers to access services.

The Communications Authority of Kenya and Stanbic Bank were among other organisations affected by the disruption.

“Due to the ongoing global Microsoft 365 outage, our email services are temporarily unavailable,” the government agency said on X.

The outage spread from an initial impact reported in the United States and the Americas to multiple regions worldwide.

Connectivity errors

Microsoft attributed the problem to elevated load on its infrastructure across multiple regions, saying this was contributing to connectivity errors.

The tech company said it had implemented fixes but was still working to restore services after some of the changes failed to deliver the expected improvement.

“We've monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they're not taking as expected,” Microsoft said in an update on X at 6 a.m. EAT on Friday.

The firm said it was identifying alternative measures to increase capacity, without giving a timeline for full restoration. The company said it was not aware of any malicious activity behind the disruption.

By 3pm EAT on Friday, outage-tracking website Downdetector was still reporting problems with Outlook and Microsoft 365 in Kenya.

Microsoft 365 is the company's cloud-based subscription service that includes applications such as Outlook, Teams and Word. More than 430 million people use its applications, according to the company's website.

The disruption also had knock-on effects on other technology platforms. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, said it was investigating an issue affecting its connections to Microsoft's services, which had caused some tools to malfunction.

Rival Anthropic, which owns the Claude chatbot, also reported problems linked to the outage.

The latest incident adds to a series of disruptions affecting Microsoft's productivity and cloud services over the past year.

Microsoft experienced a disruption to its Azure cloud platform in October 2025 that affected its productivity software and services across several industries.

Its Microsoft 365 suite also suffered a prolonged outage in September 2026, which the company attributed to a core authentication configuration problem.

In January 2026, another outage affected Microsoft 365 users, while a further disruption was reported in October last year.

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