In brief: The Microsoft 365 outage this week reportedly sent businesses, government agencies, and other organizations across Japan scurrying for old-school fax machines and landline phones to maintain normal operations. The outage, which has yet to be fully fixed, affects almost all of Microsoft's popular cloud services, including Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Copilot, and Xbox.
According to The Japan Times, workers across the country had to resort to age-old technologies to keep operating amid the outage, while organizations without analog backup plans were forced to stop work. Japan's Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary, Masanao Ozaki, confirmed that the Asian nation's shared IT backbone also went down, disrupting critical government operations.
While traders and business owners lamented the lack of productivity and financial losses, workers welcomed the temporary respite from Japan's infamous workaholic culture, which doctors, researchers, and activists blame for physical and mental health crises, demographic decline, substance abuse, and strained family relations.
One worker reported calling his boss in a panic after being unable to access Outlook. He was surprised and relieved in equal measure when his boss told him to take the day off because there was nothing to do at work without access to any of the cloud services the company uses on a daily basis. Another person stated that the only thing they did all day was to clean the coffee machine.
It was not, however, all fun and games for workers across Japan. Some said that they had to dust off old fax machines and landline phones to get the job done. As one Japanese social media user who had to brush up on their faxing skills put it, "I guess phones and fax machines really are unbeatable ... we're going full analog."
In case you haven't been keeping up with the Microsoft 365 outage saga, people first started reporting problems on Thursday morning after being unable to access Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, and Copilot.
Xbox is also badly affected, with users reporting being unable to sign in to their accounts. While some gamers say their digital games are failing to launch or cloud save synchronization is experiencing long queue times, others are complaining about not being able to access Xbox Cloud Gaming.
Redmond initially said it had fixed some of the issues, but later reported that some affected servers were inexplicably going offline again after being restored.
More than 24 hours into the outage, services have yet to return to normal, according to the company's own Health Status website. The latest update states that Microsoft 365 Business and Enterprise users "may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services" at this time, and that the company "does not have an ETA for full recovery."