When Microsoft 365 went down this week, a lot of offices in Japan simply went back to the fax machine, according to The Japan Times. The outage reached Japan in the early hours of November 13 local time and knocked out Outlook and other services. Mie Prefecture's government, where all 7,500 staff rely on Outlook, asked residents to contact it by phone or fax instead, and companies such as Chubu Electric Power and Brother Industries moved outside communication from email to phone calls. Credit card issuer Credit Saison warned of delays in answering inquiries, and universities including Kyushu and Waseda reported disruptions too.

The central government was also affected by the outage. Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said the Government Solution Service (GSS), a shared network the Digital Agency oversees for government employees, lost access to Outlook and other Microsoft products, while Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara said communications between ministries were disrupted. Staff apparently fell back on paper copies and phone calls to keep things moving. Ironically, Japan tried to phase faxes out of its ministries back in 2021, and bureaucrats pushed back hard, with some arguing faxes were more secure than email.Microsoft says services were fully restored on November 14, after an outage that stretched into a second day. The company says the problem came from an issue introduced during an earlier network capacity upgrade, which surfaced after a more recent network change, and that it was not related to cyber activity or AI agents. A full post-incident report should follow once its review is complete.