Dozens of countries were left without Outlook and Teams for almost 24 hours. With governments, hospitals, stockbrokers, railway operators and other businesses scrambling for alternatives, the scenes that emerged from the collapse of Microsoft’s services were somewhat surreal.

On one hand, employees were celebrating an unexpected day off. On the other, countries such as Japan, renowned for their technological sophistication, resorted to solutions that younger generations may not even know how to operate: landline telephones and fax machines, which, it is worth noting, were invented in 1864 and have been in use since the 19th century, or the handwritten, often illegible prescriptions that pharmacists somehow manage to decipher.

This return to traditional methods was the only backup plan available as Microsoft was receiving 20,000 reports of problems every passing minute from every corner of the planet.

Today, a day later, the vast majority of Microsoft’s services have been restored. In the early hours of the morning, the company reported that it was seeing a “steady recovery” across all affected environments. At the same time, it is monitoring the volume of emails stuck in delivery queues and has clarified that it will not declare the incident resolved until every message has been delivered.

In practical terms, this means that some younger users will experience the “magic” of traditional postal services, when you could send a letter on Thursday and consider yourself lucky if it arrived sometime on Saturday or Sunday, as is now expected to happen with Microsoft’s undelivered emails. And although this may be a useful lesson for those who have never experienced life without technology making everything quick and easy, the question is whether we have ultimately invested so heavily in technology that our societies have become entirely dependent on it.

Before answering that question with what might seem obvious, it is worth examining what actually happened. The problem began on the afternoon of Thursday, 12 November, in the evening Greek time, initially in the United States. Within approximately an hour, reports of problems or complete service failures were pouring into Microsoft from 74 countries. More than 7.4 million reports were recorded in total, peaking at almost 20,000 per minute.

The failure affected Exchange Online, Microsoft’s cloud-based email and calendar service, and from there disrupted or delayed Outlook, Teams, Copilot and a range of connected applications. Organisations hosting Microsoft services on their own servers were largely spared.

What was most striking, however, was that the world’s most digitally advanced countries did not always have a digital backup plan. In Japan, where the outage arrived just as the working day began on Friday, brokerage firms and asset managers returned to fax machines to confirm transactions, while the publication of certain mutual fund reference prices was delayed, according to Nikkei.

As Microsoft 365 struggles to fix a global outage, some workers in Japan are beginning to praise the good old fax machine for its reliability. 👉 https://t.co/LSFXvT1TSe https://t.co/gIGlVWeZGe

— The Japan Times (@japantimes) November 13, 2026

Tokyo’s international air cargo terminal asked customers to communicate by telephone or fax, while the Japanese government acknowledged that its own IT infrastructure had also been affected. A remarkable irony for a country that Americans often regard as offering a glimpse of what technology will look like a century from now, where humanoid robots greeting and serving customers are a familiar sight.

In Germany, railway operator Deutsche Bahn reported a “massive slowdown” in Outlook from 7pm on Thursday, leaving it able to send only limited information about alternative routes. Trains continued to operate normally, while Germany’s Digital Ministry said there had been no major problems across the federal administration.

What caused it: Another update that went wrong

Microsoft has been categorical that the incident was not a cyberattack. It described the disruption as a “technical issue unrelated to cybersecurity or AI/agents”. According to the company, the problem originated during an earlier network capacity upgrade and emerged following a recent network change. The recovery was far from straightforward: on Friday, Microsoft initially reported “positive results” from restarting servers, only to acknowledge several hours later that those measures had not produced the expected outcome.

This is where long-time Windows users might smile bitterly. Microsoft is somewhat notorious for its updates: the familiar screen displaying “Installing updates 20%. Do not turn off your computer”, the restart in the middle of a working day, the update that breaks something which had been working perfectly until the previous day, forcing the company to withdraw it. Almost everyone has a story about an update that brought their system to a standstill for some time.

The question is what happens when the same thing occurs not on an individual computer, but in the cloud infrastructure supporting public services, essential operations, hospitals and financial markets. Australia’s Minister for Home Affairs and Cyber Security, Tony Burke, publicly drew the comparison: Microsoft, he said, believes it is dealing with something similar to the CrowdStrike incident, when an update “went wrong”. In 2024, a faulty CrowdStrike update brought millions of Windows computers around the world to a standstill.

Australia’s spy agency and federal police were among the organizations caught up in a widespread outage of Microsoft programs, with the government triggering an agreement with the company to ensure priority restoration of services https://t.co/gwdHq2bLQ4 https://t.co/N542Jsjp0U

— Reuters (@Reuters) November 13, 2026

And this is not the first time this year. Microsoft experienced a Microsoft 365 outage in January and another disruption affecting its Azure cloud platform last month, following a previous outage in October 2025.

Who was brought to a standstill

The list is extensive. In Britain, the NHS and London’s Metropolitan Police were affected. In Ireland, the national health service, the HSE, advised doctors and pharmacists to return to paper prescriptions. In Australia, the federal police and intelligence services experienced problems. Indian airlines warned of delays in passenger services, Maersk warned customers of delayed updates, while traders at CMC Markets in Singapore worked using telephones and WhatsApp.

Britain ground to a halt on Friday after a global Microsoft tech blackout forced services across the country to ditch computers and return to pen and paper. Businesses across the country were unable to access their emails and other programs in a worldwide software failure that sent parts of the NHS, police forces, the court system and Whitehall back to the pre-digital age. 🔗 https://t.co/DwimARvrqi

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) November 14, 2026

Yesterday, Friday, Microsoft issued a public apology: “We deeply regret the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners. We recognise the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously.”

The company explained that, because of the volume of demand, it had restored services gradually, checking stability at each stage: “While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable recovery.” It promised to publish a detailed report on the incident once its internal investigation was complete.

Microsoft shares fell 1.7% before Friday’s opening bell, but traded broadly flat during the session, recording a modest gain in the afternoon. The stock remains approximately 8% higher since the beginning of the year. The greatest impact was felt in the day-to-day functioning of financial markets.

Euronext reported email problems, a securities firm in Taiwan cancelled a bond buyback, Richemont briefly delayed the publication of its half-year results, Aviva activated backup systems for its earnings conference calls, and Workhorse postponed its own announcement until 16 November. Morningstar DBRS analyst Mario De Cicco estimates global insured losses at between $300 million and $500 million, compared with an estimated $400 million to $1.5 billion for the CrowdStrike outage in 2024.

But what does this entire episode mean for the future? Microsoft 365 has more than 450 million commercial users, and that is precisely what is at stake. “It shows how much of the working day now runs through the email and collaboration tools of a single provider,” noted Luke Kehoe of Ookla, the parent company of Downdetector. Irish security consultant Brian Honan warned of “concentration risk” when everything depends on one provider.

Josh Gilbert of eToro focuses on the recurrence of such incidents: if reliability begins to look like a chronic problem, every IT department will have reason to think twice before placing even more of its operations in the hands of a single provider.

Jason Ader of William Blair believes Microsoft’s position will remain unchanged in the short term, as replacing tools so deeply embedded in everyday working life is both costly and complex. In the longer term, however, some customers may become more receptive to alternatives such as Google Workspace or the new office tools unveiled this week by Anthropic, the creator of Claude AI.

The competition has already begun to respond: since October 2025, Google has offered a service that synchronises emails and files so employees can switch to Gmail and Google Drive during a Microsoft outage. In Tokyo, the government says it is “closely monitoring” the company’s response. The next chapter will be written by the detailed incident report Microsoft has promised to publish.