South Africa, Nov. 13 -- The outage began on Thursday, 12 November, and continued into Friday, affecting users across multiple regions, including South Africa.

Microsoft initially attributed the disruption to elevated infrastructure loads, later clarifying that the problem was not caused by increased user traffic but by a number of servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable.

The company subsequently identified an issue involving a process on affected servers responsible for establishing secure connections. The process was becoming overwhelmed, causing servers to stop processing requests.

In its service updates, Microsoft said it was preparing a configuration change to address the problem, while also restarting affected infrastructure an...