Reasons why Microsoft, internet were down in the past 24 hours

A major internet outage affected parts of South Africa and left several frustrated at the notion that productivity had to come to a delay or halt depending on the area users were in.

On Friday, network speed was still affected reeling from the aftermath of what could arguably have been related to an outage that destabilized West and Central Africa on Thursday due to failures of some cables reported failures.

Reports say cable operator Seacom confirmed issues on its West African Cable system.

This meant those who relied on that cable were redirected to the Google Equiano cable which Seacom uses.

The Ivory Coast was impacted while Liberia, Benin, Ghana, and Burkina Faso were seeing massive impacts.

In South Africa network operators like Vodacom flagged a few issues, while Microsoft Teams was offline for most parts of the day.

Those using teams to host meetings were left with more questions than answers as the service provider Microsoft flagged issues from around 1 pm on Thursday.

Issues with Outlook, teams, and cloud computing were in the red with issues, while Microsoft confirmed probes into the matter.

It was a number of Microsoft 365 users who flagged issues with cloud computing service Azure.

We’re investigating reports of an issue where some users in the EMEA region are unable to access one or more Microsoft 365 services. Please follow the SI MO737187 in your admin center for more details. Majority of the reports are coming from South Africa and the United Kingdom.

— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) March 14, 2024

While reasons for the outages remain speculative, pending investigations, some of the possible reasons for the outages include software updates, high demand and other technical issues that can spike infrastructure issues that can disrupt services.

Rolling out the latest or specific software updates can result in temporary service disruptions.

Other issues could be planned maintenance, infrastructure issues, or even cyber-attacks which can in some instances disrupt service.

Whatever the reason, it remains clear that the world has become highly dependent on connectivity, and any issues to connections do result in a massive domino effect that ripples into an economic flat tire situation, where the impact causes more exponential harm than good.

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