SARS issues alert over Microsoft outage as Outlook, Teams and 365 go offline
The South African Revenue Service (SARS) has issued a notice to taxpayers about a global service outage hitting Microsoft, warning that it may disrupt its operations.
“Our technical teams are engaging directly with Microsoft to address the disruption. Further updates will be communicated as information becomes available,” SARS said.
The outage hit global tech and software giant Microsoft on Thursday (12 November), extending into Friday. As of the time of reporting, the exact issue had not yet been identified or resolved.
The issue affected several online and cloud services, including crucial services such as Outlook, Teams, and other Microsoft 365 applications at both the consumer and enterprise levels.
Businesses across South Africa reported being “paralysed” by the outage and being unable to communicate or work.
In the latest update from Microsoft, it said that it was working to restore server stability and reported “positive results”.
However, the services remain largely offline.
“We’ll continue to monitor progress and are working to expand an upstream authentication/routing configuration component patch to servers supporting active regions coming online,” it said.
Questions remain about what exactly went wrong, with the software giant nixing “malicious activity” as the cause.
Microsoft traced the problem to overloaded servers.
“Our investigation has found that a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding and contributes to the capacity loss,” it said.
“As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident.”
The company said it would provide an in-depth post-incident report once the problem has been resolved.
“We will continue to treat this incident with urgency and priority until full resolution. Once mitigated, we will provide full details of the root cause, defense-in-depth repair items, and more within a Post-Incident Report.”
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