Undersea cable outage breaks the internet in Mzansi

THERE was mass panic and sheer joy in offices around the world when Microsoft suffered a widespread outage.

The internet and emails - the bane of our existence - but also the lifeline of many businesses, were down, but it wasn’t the only Microsoft service to go down on Thursday, 14 March.

The widespread internet outages in Mzansi were due to several undersea cable breaks. Tech and financial companies seemed to be the hardest hit. 

Microsoft struggled with a service outage in Europe, the Middle East and Africa that left businesses and home users without access to cloud services such as Microsoft 365, Teams and Azure.

Many organisations rely heavily on Microsoft's services to operate effectively.

"We are investigating reports of an issue where some users in the EMEA region are unable to access one or more Microsoft 365 services."

Microsoft announced on the X social media platform.

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"We have identified a network issue in the region and are redirecting traffic to mitigate the impact."

While Mzansi is in the dark, excuse the pun, South Africans were quick to mock the outage on social media. Platforms, including x, were quickly flooded with memes about the Microsoft outage.

Microsoft hasn't advised when its services would be restored.

According to Down Detector, an online platform that provides users with real-time information about the status of various websites and services, Microsoft's outage seemed to have far-reaching implications for other popular businesses.

The platform is powered by Ookla, is a web service that provides free analysis of internet access performance metrics, such as connection data rate and latency.

Down Detector reported outages on Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, Vodacom, Seacom and even X (formerly Twitter).

MTN, Telkom and Standard Bank are also reported to be suffering due to the network outage.