Kenyan Saccos Switch Channels as Microsoft Outage Disrupts Emails

Kenya, 13 November 2026 - Companies that rely on Microsoft cloud services on Friday moved to inform clients of alternative communication channels after a global outage disrupted email correspondence.

In Kenya, savings and credit cooperative societies (Saccos) involved in deposit taking, offering affordable credit facilities, and asset management, were swift to alert their customers, asking them to visit offices in person or use telephone services for assistance.

One Sacco told its clients that "we are experiencing disruption to our email services due to a wider Microsoft service incident.”

“This may impact our ability to send and receive emails,” the message added.

The outage began on Thursday and continued into Friday. It disrupted Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 tools used by businesses, schools and governments around the world.

Microsoft said some services had shown only partial recovery. The company said affected servers had become unexpectedly unavailable, putting pressure on the remaining systems and causing connectivity problems for users in multiple regions.

The company confirmed that users were having trouble accessing several Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook email, Teams messaging and meetings, OneDrive file storage and the Copilot artificial intelligence assistant.

The disruption also affected Exchange Online, Microsoft’s email and calendar platform, as well as SharePoint, Power BI, Defender XDR and other enterprise services. Microsoft said some users could not view calendar details or open certain files, while Copilot could not function properly in some cases.