Microsoft’s Exchange Online disruption remained unresolved on Friday morning, with the company reporting only limited progress towards restoring mailbox access.
A Microsoft administrative-console notice, reproduced by the University of Pennsylvania and updated at 06:56 UTC (08:56 SAST) on 13 November, still classified incident EX1550543 as service degradation, with no end time.
Mailbox access and connected mail flow affected
The notice identifies Outlook on the web and several other Exchange connection methods as potentially affected. Mail passing between on-premises systems and Exchange Online can also be disrupted. It does not establish that every Outlook user or Microsoft service is offline.
Recovery efforts bring limited gains
Microsoft reported marginal success while checking infrastructure patches and reboots and adding virtual-machine capacity. It said it was not aware of malicious activity causing the incident; the root cause remained undetermined in the notice.
No verified South African user total was available in this source. Organisations should consult their own Microsoft service-health dashboard for tenant-specific updates. This report does not establish full recovery or a confirmed restoration deadline.
AI-generated editorial illustration of interrupted email connectivity, created for EBNewsDaily on 13 November 2026. This is not a Microsoft interface, outage screenshot or evidence of a cyberattack. Image: OpenAI image generation / EBNewsDaily. Display may crop or resize.
