Global Microsoft 365 Outage Drives Japan Finance Back to Fax

Parts of Japan's financial sector were forced to rely on a traditional method of communication following a worldwide Microsoft outage. Market participants shifted to fax after the Outlook email system, which is used for confirming trading details, became inaccessible.

The disruption, which began on Thursday, affected Microsoft 365 business applications globally, including Teams, SharePoint, Copilot, and Outlook. At the peak of the incident, Downdetector recorded upwards of 130,000 Outlook-related reports from the United States.

The Outage's Impact on Japan's Financial Market

Nikkei reported that the outage caused disruption in Japan's financial market. A broker which depends on Microsoft's email platform instructed a domestic asset manager to suspend order placement, according to a source on the trading desk.

Additionally, investment trusts deferred the publication of their net asset values. Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki verified that the government's shared IT infrastructure, managed by the Digital Agency, was also brought down.

The fundamental cause is still undetermined. Microsoft stated that its servers failed automated health checks and that a core process responsible for setting up secure connections became overloaded.

The company added that servers which recovered frequently went down again once traffic resumed. Microsoft's Japanese office reported it had discovered no evidence suggesting a cyberattack.

The impact was not limited to Japan. ABC News reported that some Australian workers similarly reverted to fax machines. Ashwin Pal, a partner at RSM Australia, estimated that local businesses faced costs in the billions of Australian dollars.

We're continuing to work on recovering our frontend servers while implementing further traffic optimization actions to improve service stability and increase capacity. A more comprehensive update can be found at MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as…

— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) November 13, 2026

This Microsoft outage comes after a series of failures at major technology providers. A distinct outage in September disrupted services for ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok. In the cryptocurrency sphere, this pattern rekindles the discussion around the centralization issues within Web3.

Wall Street Unfazed by the Outage

Japan still possesses a domestic industry for fax technology. Brother, Canon, and Ricoh still market fax machines and printers that incorporate fax functions. Nonetheless, fax is no longer a primary business for any of these companies.

Microsoft's stock price ended Thursday marginally up, unfazed by the disruption, before falling in overnight trading. The shares were already facing strain after Microsoft surpassed Nvidia in market capitalization earlier in the week.

Nonetheless, an outage of this size demonstrates the fragility of financial infrastructure. One single point of failure can bring critical systems to a halt, as a cooling malfunction at a CME data center illustrated last year.