Microsoft Outage Pushes Kenya's Banks onto WhatsApp and Phone Lines

A global Microsoft outage cut email at several of Kenya's largest banks on Friday, forcing lenders to reroute customer queries to WhatsApp and call centres. Equity Bank, UBA Kenya, Stanbic Bank Kenya and Standard Chartered Bank Kenya all issued notices. None reported problems with payments.

The mechanism was simple. Banks run their email and file tools on Microsoft's cloud. When that cloud broke, basic communication channels broke with it. Loop, NCBA Group's digital bank, said both its email and in-app support were down and pointed customers to phone lines and social media.

What did each bank tell customers?

• UBA Kenya named Microsoft Outlook as the cause and offered phone lines, a WhatsApp number and relationship managers. "We wish to inform you that due to a global service disruption affecting Microsoft Outlook, our email services are temporarily unavailable. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause," the bank told customers in a text on Friday.
• Equity Bank cited "a global service disruption" without naming Microsoft and asked customers to call or message it on WhatsApp.
• Stanbic Bank Kenya, part of South Africa's Standard Bank Group, directed customers to its Voice Branch call centre or their relationship managers.
• Standard Chartered Bank Kenya told customers by text only that its email service was unavailable.

None of the notices mentioned payment or mobile banking issues.

Who else was hit?

Insurers felt the strain too. Old Mutual Kenya apologised to customers after losing access to email. APA Insurance lost email as well as Microsoft's SharePoint and OneDrive, according to an email seen by TechCabal.

The damage reached beyond finance. Securex Agencies, a Nairobi-based security company founded in 1970, told clients to use its phone line and social media pages for "urgent security-related matters". A travel agency told clients it could not access its email.

What caused the outage?

Microsoft said it was investigating mailbox problems shortly before 1 PM New York time on Thursday. That was 9 PM in Nairobi — the hour when Old Mutual's Kenyan unit says its email went down.

Microsoft blamed a large number of servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable, which pushed extra load onto the rest of its infrastructure. The company said it saw no sign of a cyberattack. The failure spread to 74 countries and territories in about an hour, according to Downdetector. By Friday morning, Microsoft said service capacity had not yet returned to normal levels. It has given no estimate for full recovery.

Why does the exposure reach so far?

Equity serves 23.3 million customers and processes 89.7% of transactions on digital platforms. London-based Standard Chartered owns 73.89% of its Kenyan unit. Nigeria's UBA operates in 20 African countries as well as in the US, the UK, France and the United Arab Emirates. When one foreign cloud provider fails, banks across three continents lose their basic tools at once.

Friday's failure fits a pattern. Microsoft 365 outages hit in January and July this year. A late-August incident locked thousands of users worldwide out of their mailboxes.

Why does Kenya have few alternatives?

A $1 billion Microsoft and G42 data centre, meant to host an Azure cloud region for East Africa, stalled when the government refused the payment guarantees the companies sought. Kenyan officials have since said the project remains on track. East Africa's live data-centre load stood at about 30 megawatts in 2025, according to an industry estimate.

A local data centre would not necessarily have shielded Kenyan users, because Microsoft runs its email and file services on shared global infrastructure. But the outage showed how few fallback options Kenyan companies have when that infrastructure breaks — and lenders keep moving almost all customer business onto digital channels.