Japan's Workforce Reverts to Fax Machines as Microsoft 365 Outage Stretches Past 24 Hours
A prolonged Microsoft 365 service disruption has forced Japanese businesses to abandon digital tools and resort to older technologies, with some workers finding unexpected downtime in the outage.
The service interruption affecting Microsoft 365 has now persisted for nearly a full day. According to the Japan Times, Japanese employees impacted by the widespread outage have turned to older technologies, notably fax machines, to maintain business operations during the extended service blackout. When workers arrived at their offices on Friday, the disruption remained active, creating significant operational challenges across multiple sectors.
Organizations depending on Microsoft 365 have found themselves unable to access Outlook, Teams, and Copilot. The service failure has left workplaces confronting system errors and blank displays, forcing them to postpone scheduled meetings and suspend normal operations. The situation has created an unusual circumstance in Japan's demanding work environment, where some employees have experienced an unplanned break from their usual responsibilities. One worker shared on X: "I couldn't open Outlook and panicked … I got in touch with my boss and was told to stay home." Another described their day as limited to mundane tasks, noting that "the only task they could carry out at work was to clean the coffee machine in the production room."