Friday the 13th: Cyber Outage Continues; Japan Forced to Revert to FAX Machines
November 13, 2026
UPDATED 8:25 AM EST -- THE MICROSOFT OUTAGE ___IS___ A CYBER-ATTACK
Buckle your seat belts, it appears we're all in for a rather wild ride.
The impact of the major outage of Microsoft's Microsoft 365 business software and other major companies, which began yesterday (Story Here) is ONGOING and causing major problems globally. One massive problem is financial market trading. The emails used to confirm transactions have stopped, leaving market participants busy using alternative methods such as faxes.
"A brokerage firm that uses Microsoft's email system asked us not to place the order." This is what was said from the trading department of a domestic investment management company.
The morning trading fees at the Tokyo Stock Exchange Prime Market were paid the day before.
Apparently, this is "just the beginning" and things are apparently going to get a LOT worse:
The electronic outages/cyber-attacks are now causing PANIC, and people are getting their money out of anything electronic:
STILL HAVE NOT IDENTIFIED THE PROBLEM
From Asia to the U.S., Microsoft’s outage involving services like Outlook and Teams has dragged on for hours and impacted many users, companies and some government operations as the technology giant struggled to fix the issue.
Microsoft said in an update Friday that the outage was affecting a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online and email services. Services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were reported by users to be down.
Microsoft scrambles to recover services
The Redmond, Washington-based company said it was trying different ways to identify the cause of the problem and get its servers back online, using “a measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure.” Said one former tech-guy "All those H-1b VISA people they hired to replace Americans can't seem to figure out what's going on."
The company said it did not have any indication that the outage was caused by malicious activity and would treat the incident “with urgency and priority until full resolution.”
Over 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft said on its website.
Roughly 130,000 users from dozens of countries reported problems accessing Outlook on the outage tracker Downdetector on Thursday, although reports have since declined.
A series of posts by the company on X suggested its engineers were struggling to get the problem fully under control.
Hours after saying it managed to successfully restore service health and functionality, the company said it had updated its list of impacted services and was continuing to address the issue.
Its most recent post offered little hope for users expecting a quick resolution.
WORST CASE
Worst case if Microsoft/Azure stays down long enough:Days 1-2: Logins fail. Airlines, banks, apps, email, and ordering systems break. Most people notice immediately. We are now entering Day 2.Days 3-5: Restocking slows. Pharmacies, stores, and warehouses start missing high-turnover items. Manual workarounds can’t keep up with normal volume.Days 6-9: Gaps become obvious. Food, fuel, insulin, sensors, and everyday goods thin out in many places. Logistics back up. Businesses cut hours.
Days 10-14: Coordination failure is the real problem. Physical stock still exists, but the systems that move and allocate it don’t. Shortages and delays compound. Recovery takes extra days even after systems return.Most outages end before this. A multi-day one with limited workarounds does not. The digital layer fails first. Everything that depends on it follows.
Welcome to Friday the 13th. . .
AI WORST CASE
The Artificial Intelligence system "GROK" was asked what the worst case would be. It responded . . .
UPDATE 8: 25 AM EST
The ongoing Microsoft (and other) outage situation ___is___ a Cyber-attack!
CISA Confirms Active Exploitation of Outlook User Interaction 0-Day Vulnerability
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has confirmed active exploitation of a Microsoft Outlook zero-day vulnerability, CVE-2026-124194, that can expose user authentication data.
According to Microsoft’s security advisory, an attacker can send a specially crafted message file and persuade a victim to open it in Outlook.
The application may then connect to an attacker-controlled network location without showing its usual warning about external content. Microsoft released security updates for an actively exploited Outlook network-spoofing flaw (CVSS 6.5) that allows unauthenticated attackers to spoof networks.
