{
  "id": 19787491,
  "title": "Friday the 13th delivers tech horror show",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/11/13/friday-the-13th-delivers-tech-horror-show",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-11-13T09:29:47.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "ITWeb",
    "slug": "itweb",
    "url": "https://www.itweb.co.za/article/friday-the-13th-delivers-tech-horror-show/rxP3jqBEJxVMA2ye"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "On Friday the 13th, a series of technology outages unfolded overnight, disrupting Microsoft Exchange Online services and impacting major AI platforms like Claude and ChatGPT. The issues began around 6pm SAST, with users experiencing problems accessing their mailboxes through Outlook on the web, desktop and mobile apps, as well as delayed e-mail messages. Microsoft initially ruled out a cyber attack, attributing the problems to a wider issue affecting multiple Microsoft 365 services.\n\nBy 6.30am, Tom's Guide reported that over 100,000 users were flocking to outage-reporting website Downdetector to report issues, with the number still rising. Microsoft's outage persisted for more than 12 hours due to traffic being redirected away from unavailable servers, placing additional pressure on the remaining infrastructure. The company identified the problematic servers and started redistributing Outlook traffic across its global network to mitigate the issue.\n\nMicrosoft pursued multiple workstreams to pinpoint the root cause of the traffic influx and restore the backend servers' recoverability. The software company acknowledged that they were treating the incident with urgency and priority until full resolution. It is important to note that Microsoft had not found any evidence of malicious activity causing the incident as of the latest update at 8am.\n\nLinda Morris, director of Smart Technology Centre, highlighted the vulnerability of hosted services to downtime, emphasizing that modern multi-factor authentication and single authentication layers mean localized failures can quickly disrupt workflows in interconnected business environments. OpenAI also experienced an intermittent downtime affecting its Microsoft connectors, warning that new connections may fail and existing tools may not work as expected. The AI company is currently investigating the issue but has not published a specific uptime percentage for the incident.",
  "summary": "Today’s outage is the latest of several Microsoft 365 disruptions since 6 October, and its root cause is still being pinpointed.",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}