Japanese businesses that depend on Microsoft 365 are turning to fax machines and other analog tools as a widespread outage continues to block access to Outlook, Teams, Copilot and OneDrive, according to reports from the country. Workers have described encountering error messages and blank screens, leaving them unable to hold meetings or complete tasks. The disruption has affected Microsoft 365 as a whole, not just individual applications.
For some employees, the downtime brought an unexpected break from Japan's demanding work culture. One person wrote on X that they panicked when Outlook would not open, then contacted their boss and were told to stay home. Another said the only thing they could accomplish at the office was cleaning the coffee machine in the production room.
Other workplaces have taken a more old-fashioned route. One user said the server problem had made work impossible since the morning and declared that telephones and fax machines remain unmatched, adding that the operation was going fully analog. A second employee confirmed that their company had switched to fax machines to distribute the regular updates it normally sends as PDFs, and celebrated the durability of analog methods.
The reliance on Microsoft is deep in Japan, where roughly 78 percent of companies use the company's services for their digital infrastructure. The outage started on Thursday and has caused extensive disruption to Outlook, Teams, Copilot, OneDrive and the broader Microsoft 365 suite. Its effects have spread across entire sectors, reaching UK health care as well as businesses, travel and transport operations.
Microsoft said in its latest update that it was making encouraging recovery progress in Europe and that conditions in America were improving, though it cautioned that some users could still hit intermittent problems. The company has also rejected suggestions that a cybersecurity breach caused the failure. The fallout has extended to corporate reporting, with Switzerland's luxury group Richemont, owner of Cartier, delaying the release of its latest earnings report.
The incident highlights how heavily large organizations in Japan and elsewhere have concentrated their productivity tools in a single vendor, and how quickly routine work stalls when those tools go dark. For US companies that also run on Microsoft 365, the episode offers a view of the operational fallout their counterparts abroad are managing while recovery continues.
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