Microsoft outage is a wake-up call for firms’ contingency plans
The global Microsoft outage has left millions of firms unable to carry out simple tasks, underlining the need to review their dependence on systems and consider alternatives.
Hitting more than 70 countries, the UK’s financial services sector has not escaped the disruption.
Turning to other tasks
Michelle Lawson, director at Lawson Financial, was fairly optimistic and said that while her tasks had been affected, being unable to communicate through online services would “enable people to pick up the phone, which is quite nice, because they seem to have forgotten how to do that”.
Lawson said she was not currently worried about accessing information shared over email, as it gave her the opportunity to catch up with other work.
“I’ve got accounts to do and other stuff, there’s always something that we’re able to do,” she added.
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Lawson said the CRM she used also made the situation manageable: “As much as we rely on our email inboxes, we need it to send documents, but there’s still post and other means. We’ve managed before.”
She was yet to submit any mortgage applications, so was unaware of any impact the outage was having on those processes.
Reliance on technology
Scott Taylor-Barr, principal adviser at Barndale Financial Management, said his CRM ran on Microsoft Syndicate, so this was impacting that as well as his emails.
Taylor-Barr said this had prompted him to think about what would happen if something similar happened in the future, but the consensus was it would be resolved in 24 hours, meaning nothing more than a weekend of catching up.
Still, his firm will have to consider changing meetings from Teams to Zoom or Google Meet to ensure other systems are readily available if needed.
He is “holding fire” while debating whether any permanent changes are needed, adding that outages were not unique to Microsoft, and a different company could be hit at any time.
“Switching over emails is a little bit trickier. Even if it’s temporarily saying to people, ‘here’s my personal email address’, which is Google and doesn’t seem to be affected, there are workarounds available, but it’s going to be frustrating and time-consuming if we have to go down that route,” Taylor-Barr added.
Firms need to be resilient
The outage reinforces the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) request for firms to review their resilience, Taylor-Barr added.
Taylor-Barr said: “It’s starting to play out in your mind, the quandary of not really wanting to spend lots of time and effort moving systems but at the same time, you’ve got to start thinking about these things. If, come Sunday evening and it’s still down and no one knows when it’s going to be back up and running, what does the future look like? What do we start to do?”
Taylor-Barr has not tried to submit any applications or access any lender sites yet, as he already completed this earlier in the week, but noted that emails are heavily relied on to progress new cases.
He said: “If it’s just today, a lot of people will just stick it out, but if it gets to Sunday evening and it’s not back, we will see a lot of changes and people moving things away from Microsoft.
“Each component of our business that uses Microsoft, what’s the alternative?”
He added that this could also be a problem for compliance where CRMs are impacted: “If I can’t use the CRM, how should I submit cases? I can send it to the lender, but how do I notify Openwork that this piece of business has been submitted?”
Justin Moy, managing director at EHF Mortgages, uses Google Business and a MacBook, so has not been affected, but noted comms from lenders this morning about the outage.
However, Moy said a few mortgage offers had come through, so some lenders appeared to be operating normally.
On the broker side: “I am on a WhatsApp group with around 70-80 brokers, and some have said they’ve written today off, so it’s a three-day weekend for some,” Moy added.
“It shows how reliant people are on the Microsoft machine, and it’s not just us with our emails, it’s lenders investing vast sums of money into infrastructure that’s only as good as it is when it’s working.”
Moy said these instances were “very few and far between” but were a reminder about data security, having adequate contingency plans for outages and finding other ways to communicate with customers quickly, whether that is another email provider, text message or WhatsApp.
He echoed that this aligned with the FCA urging firms to have contingency plans in place.
“It reminds us not to rest on our laurels and hope everything works okay, especially when it’s Friday the 13th,” Moy added.
