A massive, 12-hour global Microsoft 365 outage has severely disrupted international financial hubs, forcing trading desks to revert to manual workarounds and leaving retail FX brokers struggling with customer logins and trade settlements.
The disruption, which peaked with over 130,000 Downdetector reports in the US before rolling into Asia-Pacific business hours, heavily impacted Microsoft’s Exchange Online.
We're investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas. More details can be found in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543.
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) November 12, 2026
The outage is continuing to affect services including Teams, Outlook and AI software Copilot.
FX Brokers Hit by Communication Blackout
For retail brokers, the operational impact was immediate.
Japanese broker SBI FX Trade alerted clients that Outlook users were unlikely to receive vital login and execution emails, advising them to monitor trading tools directly. Golden Way (GW) Securities, operator of FXTF, reported that while login codes functioned, email inquiries were entirely down. Retail FX broker Gaitame Finest also said it cannot check or reply to inquiries sent through its contact form because it uses Microsoft 365 for customer inquiry handling.
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According to Bloomberg, brokerages across Singapore and India warned of massive delays in customer support, while the failure of Outlook and Teams also triggered an immediate shift to manual fallback operations. At CMC Markets in Singapore, traders relied on phone calls and WhatsApp to manually bypass automated online systems.
Hand-offs and the Return of the Fax
JUST IN: Microsoft outage forces Japanese markets to switch to fax machines
— Kalshi (@Kalshi) November 13, 2026
But nowhere was the technological regression more glaring, or darkly comedic, than in Japan.
As back-office trade confirmations bottlenecked, Bloomberg reported that desks at firms like BNP Paribas Asset Management had to process settlements manually, while portfolio managers at hedge funds like Blue Edge Advisors said the outage crippled the front-to-back infrastructure of global finance, blocking access to research and trading platforms that relied on email authentication.
Prediction market Kalshi perfectly captured the industry's collective amusement on X, quipping that the outage forced Japanese markets to switch to fax machines.
