Businesses in Rwanda experienced disruptions to their daily operations following a global Microsoft outage that affected access to Outlook email services, with some organisations forced to turn to alternative communication channels to continue working.

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Bank of Kigali (BK) announced a temporary disruption in the delivery of One-Time Passwords (OTPs) through email, warning customers that those relying on the service to complete transactions could experience difficulties.

In a notice to customers, the bank said the disruption was linked to the Outlook service outage and advised those requiring email-based OTPs to contact its customer support team for assistance with alternative delivery methods.

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The disruption also affected communication between businesses and their clients, suppliers and other stakeholders, with some employees unable to carry out their usual duties.

A public relations officer working for a private company in Kigali told The New Times that the outage left him unable to access his emails for much of the working day, limiting his ability to communicate with people outside his organisation.

"The whole day, I could not access my emails, so there was literally nothing I could do. I could only talk to people who were within my organisation. Any other work that I needed to do with clients, stakeholders and regulators had to be handled through direct phone calls, WhatsApp or by physically going to their offices,” he said.

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He added that the disruption affected his productivity to the extent that he left the office at around 3pm.

"I was frustrated as a person who loves my job. I had to go home at around 3pm because I was unproductive at the office,” he said.

Equity Bank Rwanda PLC also notified customers that its email communication services were temporarily unavailable due to the global service interruption, warning that responses to email queries could be delayed.

The bank advised customers to use alternative communication channels, including its customer care numbers and its verified social media platforms.

What tech experts say:

The incident has raised questions about the dependence of businesses on international technology providers and the preparedness of organisations to maintain operations when essential digital services become unavailable.

Prof. Damien Hanyurwimfura, Acting Director of the Centre of Excellence in Internet of Things (IoT) at the University of Rwanda, said the outage should serve as a lesson for Rwandan technology developers to learn from major technology companies and strengthen efforts to develop homegrown solutions.

He said the disruption demonstrates that even major technology providers such as Microsoft can experience service failures, affecting not only their users but also the companies themselves as customers may consider switching to alternative providers.

"We are the customers of these companies. They are affected too, because their customers could shift to other service providers,” he said.

Hanyurwimfura said Rwanda is already investing in developing its own technological systems, particularly in artificial intelligence, to build local capacity.

"There are systems we are developing, although they are still at the beginning, so that we can have our own systems, especially in AI, and develop solutions based on our own data,” he said.

What happened?

The disruption was part of a global Microsoft outage that affected several services, including Outlook, Microsoft Teams and its artificial intelligence assistant Copilot.

Users in different parts of the world reported difficulties accessing emails, sending and receiving messages, viewing files and using calendar functions.

Outage-monitoring platform Downdetector recorded nearly 140,000 reports of problems with Outlook globally at the peak of the disruption on Thursday, November 12, according to the BBC.

Microsoft initially attributed the connectivity problems to elevated loads across parts of its infrastructure, with some servers becoming unavailable.

The company later clarified that the incident was linked to an issue arising from an earlier network-capacity upgrade, which surfaced following a subsequent network change.

Microsoft said the disruption was not related to a cyber-security incident.

The outage affected users across different regions, demonstrating how problems within a major technology provider's infrastructure can disrupt organisations that depend on its services.