Newshot Title: Microsoft's Worst Outage of 2026, Comparable to the Blue Screen "Thanos" Incident, Deals a Heavy Blow to the Global Financial Industry, Forcing Traders to Switch to Fax
Body:
- Day/Night Follow System Light Dark
Microsoft's Worst Outage of 2026, Comparable to the Blue Screen "Thanos" Incident, Deals a Heavy Blow to the Global Financial Industry, Forcing Traders to Switch to Fax
IT Home, November 14: According to a report yesterday (November 13) by Singapore's The Business Times, a global failure affecting multiple Microsoft software services has dealt a heavy blow to financial operations worldwide, forcing some traders to switch to phones, WhatsApp, and even fax machines to keep business running.
From Tokyo to Houston, trading desks were unable to use email systems, on which they rely for trade confirmations, price reports, and client communications. Traders in Singapore reported that some banks were unable to complete financing transactions; Euronext, Nasdaq, and Deutsche Börse all reported email problems. Indian brokerages warned clients that responses to email inquiries may be delayed, while some Japanese companies handled transactions via fax.
Eugene Koh, a sales trader at CMC Markets Singapore, said that what normally takes one email and one second may now require a phone call and several minutes, and "everyone is picking up the phone again, and our WhatsApp chat groups are busier than usual."
Ryutaro Kimura, a senior fixed-income strategist at BNP Paribas Asset Management, said that although the institution where he works was less affected and trading itself was largely unaffected, trade confirmations piled up, putting pressure on back-office settlement.
The failure occurred as oil traders were grappling with sharp oil price swings triggered by news of U.S.-Iran peace talks. 丹尼斯 · 基斯勒 (Dennis Kissler), senior vice president of the trading division at BOK Financial Securities, said his team only realized after an hour that emails could not be sent, and then began calling clients one by one. He told Bloomberg: "We were in a one-hour black hole."
Platts, a unit of S&P Global, warned that price updates may be delayed and asked market participants to provide information by phone or instant messaging tools. Platts also said that 22 biofuel prices will be suspended from publication until the problem is fixed.
The problem began shortly after noon U.S. Eastern Time on November 12 (Thursday). Within about an hour, the outage monitoring site Downdetector received failure reports from 74 countries and regions. The volume of reports peaked at 19,650 per minute, compared with fewer than 15 per minute on a normal Thursday.
Microsoft initially attributed the cause to "elevated load" on its infrastructure in multiple regions, then paused deployments and restarted servers. Later, Microsoft said a process responsible for establishing secure connections was overwhelmed, causing servers to stop processing requests.
The outage brought government agencies, traders, and businesses around the world to a standstill. Police forces in multiple parts of the UK were unable to receive online reports, and pharmacists warned that prescription dispensing may be delayed. Japan's shared government IT platform, courts in multiple locations from 洛杉矶 to Singapore, as well as Australia's intelligence agency and federal police agency, were also affected.
On Friday (November 13), Microsoft said it had fixed the root cause of the Microsoft 365 failure. The failure lasted nearly 24 hours, crippling Outlook and also affecting users of Teams and Copilot in dozens of countries.
CNBC and several other media outlets called it "Microsoft's biggest outage of 2026," and Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke (Tony Burke) said the damage and impact of this outage were comparable to the 2024 CrowdStrike global blue screen "Thanos" outage.
IT Home note: The blue screen "Thanos" incident occurred on July 19, 2024. A cybersecurity company that was supposed to protect computers, due to an erroneous update, caused a large number of Windows devices worldwide to collectively display blue screens and repeatedly restart, disrupting services such as aviation, banking, healthcare, and broadcasting. Microsoft initially estimated that about 8.5 million Windows devices were affected.
Microsoft said: "We deeply apologize for the disruption this incident caused to customers and partners," and said "services are recovering broadly and operations are stabilizing." Microsoft said in a post on X platform, "This is a technical issue unrelated to cyberattacks or AI / agents."
Related Articles
- Microsoft to remove some "compatibility mode" legacy settings from Word in Win10/Win11 versions next month, potentially affecting formatting of old documents
- Google executive uses Gemini AI to successfully get Apple iPhone Duo running Microsoft Win11
- Microsoft admits October Win10/Win11 update caused database connection anomalies, some servers may get slower over time
- Microsoft 14-year AI veteran leaves: says innovation is hard to implement, cost-reduction research not seriously considered
- Microsoft solicited AI tips during Outlook and other service outages, tweets became a venue for netizen complaints
- Opening time shortened by about 8.7%: Microsoft Win11 to get new "Run" window next month, supports dark mode
Sites under Soft Media: IT Home ZuiHuiMai - Rebate and Cashback Coupons iPhone Home Win7 Home Win10 Home Win11 Home
Software under Soft Media: Soft Media Mobile APP Applications Magic Cube ZuiHuiMai YaoZhi