A worldwide outage of Microsoft 365 services that started on Thursday, 12 November, disabled Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other cloud applications, interrupting business communications across dozens of countries.

In Kenya, the disruption surfaced through notices from banks that their email channels were temporarily unavailable, warning customers of possible delays in responses.

Equity Bank Kenya confirmed a temporary halt to its email service and urged customers to use telephone or WhatsApp for support, while assuring that other banking services remained operational.

NCBA Bank and Absa Bank Kenya also alerted customers to email disruptions, though independent verification of their notices was not available at the time of reporting.

The outage is expected to cause delayed transactions, postponed sales and added operating costs, especially for small firms that rely heavily on email for customer interaction.

Businesses that depend on cloud‑based workplace tools may also face coordination challenges when access to Microsoft services is interrupted.

Microsoft reported no evidence of malicious activity behind the outage and, on 13 November, announced technical changes that improved server stability.

The company also extended the email timeout window to 48 hours to protect delayed messages while recovery continued.