Faxes, phones and Bluetooth: Microsoft outage forces businesses to find fixes

Old-school technology including telephones, faxes and Bluetooth limited the damage for some people on Friday as a worldwide outage of Microsoft’s Outlook left millions without email.

The prolonged disruption, which also hit Microsoft Teams and Copilot, affected some of the world’s biggest institutions, from bankers and traders to shipping firms.

While most reported their core systems were still running, trading and administrative work slowed in places in the latest reminder of how much of the world’s commerce, public services and communications run on a handful of technology providers.