We were experiencing delays with delivering outgoing email email to domains hosted on Microsoft 365.
The Azure Status page stated the following on 14 March:
Impact Statement: Starting at 10:30 UTC on 14 Mar 2024, customers using Azure Services in South Africa North and South Africa West may experience increased network latency or packet drops when accessing their resources.
Current Status: We have determined that multiple fiber cables on the West Coast of Africa — WACS, MainOne, SAT3, ACE — have been impacted which reduced total capacity supporting our Regions in South Africa. In addition to these cable impacts, the on-going cable cuts in the Red Sea — EIG, Seacom, AAE-1 — are also impacting capacity on the East Coast of Africa. This combination of incidents has impacted all Africa capacity – including other Cloud providers and public Internet as well.
Update on 15 March:
We have increased capacity in the regions, and we are currently redirecting traffic flows to alternative paths. As we continue to work on further increasing the capacity, our telemetry shows signs of recovery, and packet drops have reduced significantly. Many of the Azure Services that were affected by this issue earlier have now returned to normal functionality. We are validating for any remaining impacted services, however customers should notice considerable improvements. We are currently facing technical issues with capacity activation, and these need to be resolved before we can safely pull this into the network. ETA for completion of mitigation is 18:00 UTC on 15 Mar 2024.