The disruption, which began late Thursday and stretched into Friday across at least 74 countries, knocked out core Microsoft 365 services including Exchange Online, Outlook, Teams, and the AI assistant Copilot.
As corporate IT departments across Nairobi scrambled on Friday morning to issue urgent advisories over frozen inboxes and dropped video calls, thousands of Kenyan office workers quietly staged a celebration of their own - turning a massive global Microsoft outage into a viral meme fest and pleading with the tech giant to take its sweet time fixing the mess.
The disruption, which began late Thursday and stretched into Friday across at least 74 countries, knocked out core Microsoft 365 services including Exchange Online, Outlook, Teams, and the AI assistant Copilot.
Locally, major institutions felt the pinch immediately.
Several banks issued public notices alerting customers to temporary email communication disruptions and warning of delayed responses to queries, while internal IT helpdesks at firms across the capital flooded staff WhatsApp groups with alerts advising patience as emails bounced and scheduled Teams syncs vanished.
Security firms also deployed notices.
Yet while executives and systems administrators braced for lost productivity, the mood on Kenyan social media - and across corporate timelines globally - was anything but somber.
Within hours of the blackout, X and LinkedIn transformed into a digital victory lap for white-collar…
