The Microsoft 365 outage sent Japan back to fax machines and landlines

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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,...

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