If your work email hasn’t loaded since you got to the office this morning, it isn’t your laptop. Microsoft 365, the subscription package of Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint and Copilot that many Kenyan banks and companies run their offices on, has been failing for about 18 hours, and it’s still not fully back this Friday, 13th November 2026.
Microsoft first acknowledged the problem at 8:54pm Kenyan time on Thursday, when its Microsoft 365 Status account on X said users in the Americas couldn’t get into their Exchange Online mailboxes. Exchange Online is the Microsoft service that holds a company’s email, calendars and contacts. Thirteen minutes later, Microsoft widened that warning to “users in any region”.
Banks are pointing customers to the phone
At 12:22pm, I&M Bank posted that “our email services are temporarily unavailable due to a global Microsoft email outage” and asked customers to reach their Relationship Manager, or the Contact Centre on WhatsApp at +254 710 282 828 or by phone on 0719 088 000. It sent customers an SMS with the same message at 1:36pm.
LOOP, the digital banking platform NCBA spun out of its mobile app, texted its customers ten minutes earlier, at 1:26pm. Its message says its “email and in-app support channels are currently unavailable due to a global service disruption” and asks customers to call 0709 714 444 or 0730 714 444, or reach it on its official social media pages. LOOP doesn’t name Microsoft, though the text went out while Microsoft’s outage was still running. For LOOP customers, the support chat inside the app is down as well.
Neither bank has said its app, cards or payments are affected. What’s broken is the support side: email and the tools staff use to talk to each other and to customers. So if you’re waiting on a statement, a loan letter or a reply to a complaint by email, expect a delay and use the phone or WhatsApp line instead.
What Microsoft says is broken
Microsoft’s service health page lists 20 affected services, and the common thread is Exchange Online. Anything that has to read or send email struggles: Outlook on the web and on the desktop, mail apps on phones, Teams calendars and meeting invites, Copilot answers that draw on email or files, and Microsoft’s own admin and security dashboards.
Some things still work. Microsoft says joining Teams calls and meetings, group chats and channel messages are mostly fine, and files stored in SharePoint still open. Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing business, showed no issues when we checked this afternoon.
Email sent to an affected inbox isn’t lost yet. A mail server normally gives up on a message it can’t deliver within a set time and bounces it back to the sender. Microsoft has stretched that window to 48 hours, so a message sent on Thursday night keeps trying until Saturday night. If the outage runs past that, those messages will bounce and need resending.
When it will be fixed
Microsoft hasn’t given a time. Its latest update, posted at 2:04pm Kenyan time, says recovery is complete across parts of its servers in the Asia Pacific region and that it’s now taking the same fix to other regions. Mailbox access and delayed email are improving, but “some users may continue to experience intermittent issues”. The next update is due by 3pm.
Microsoft also says it has “no evidence of malicious activity”, so this isn’t a hack. On Thursday it blamed servers that unexpectedly went offline and pushed extra load onto the rest, and it promises a full report on the root cause once the fix is done.
This outage shows how much of the Kenyan office day now sits on one company’s servers in another country. We saw the same thing in June 2025, when Google Cloud failed and took Gmail, Drive and Meet down with it. We think few Kenyan banks or companies keep a second email system ready for a day like this, which is why the fallback for both I&M and LOOP today is a phone line.
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