Prominent accounting system outage in South Africa

Multinational enterprise software company Sage experienced a significant outage relating to its Business Cloud Accounting platform in South Africa on Monday, 19 May 2024.

Several users reported being unable to log in to the platform, and the outage-detecting website Downdetector showed a significant spike in Sage reports, which began at around 05:00 on Monday, 19 May 2025.

Sage’s status page showed a “Major Outage” for “Sage Business Cloud Accounting ZA”.

“We have identified an issue preventing South African customers from logging into the product,” it said.

Sage said its DevOps team has identified a delay affecting the product and is actively investigating the root cause.

“We have scheduled maintenance starting at 08:35 SAST on the product to apply a fix to the issue,” it added.

A MyBroadband reader and Sage Business Cloud Accounting user said they are unable to log in to the system. The page appears to refresh and doesn’t present any error when the login fails.

They said the issues started after Sage’s systems underwent scheduled maintenance on Friday, 16 May. The company has additional maintenance scheduled for later this week.

Several other users have taken to social media to voice their frustration over the outage.

“Hello Sage Group ZA… What’s happening? Can’t get into our accounts,” one user posted on X.

“Good morning, is Sage online accounting offline? Unable to log in,” another posted.

Another user commented on the second post, saying they have been experiencing the issues since last night.

Sage is aware of the issues and advises that customers keep an eye on its community hub for updates.

“We are aware that some customers are currently unable to log in to Sage Business Cloud Accounting,” the community hub post reads.

“At this moment, the root cause has not yet been identified, but the issue has been escalated to our Cloud Operations team for urgent investigation.”

Update 09:52 — Sage updated its community hub post, saying a fix for the issue has been deployed and that access to the platform was being restored.

“More users should now be able to log in to the software,” it said.

It added that the service was performing as expected at 10:04.

Sage confirmed the outage in feedback to MyBroadband, adding that full access has now been restored.

“Sage can confirm that South African customers experienced difficulties logging into Sage Business Cloud Accounting until 09:44 SAST on 19 May,” it said.

“Our technical teams have identified the underlying cause and implemented a resolution, restoring full access to the product.”

Sage added that it will diligently monitor the platform to ensure uninterrupted access for all users.

“We extend our gratitude to our customers for their patience and understanding during the resolution process,” it said.

The chart below shows the spike in Downdetector reports that began around 05:00 on Monday, 19 May 2025.