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Published November 15, 2026
Microsoft’s outage showed Africa’s banks had no real plan B
Microsoft offices in Nairobi, Kenya. Image source: TechCabal
I was at Avenue Hospital in Nairobi on Friday morning when the screens went blank. The front desk apologised, then apologised again. Nobody with insurance was going anywhere. The hospital needed the insurer’s approval, and the insurer’s approval ran through systems that run on Microsoft. Microsoft was having a very bad day somewhere in the US.
So we waited, a room full of patients held up by a technical issue none of us had ever thought about. By lunch, my phone was full of bank texts saying the same: our email is down. Please call us. Did anyone have a plan?
The outage began around 4 PM GMT on Thursday and affected users in 74 countries. Microsoft blamed settings applied to servers after an update. A process that sets up secure connections became overwhelmed, and servers stopped handling requests, so the company started rolling the change back.
By Downdetector’s count, it became the largest outage across all monitored services in 2026. The timing was bad for African businesses.
