Finance professionals have been forced to fall back on technology from the 1980s, including fax machines and phones, as a global Microsoft outage disrupted operations worldwide.
The outage has affected a wide range of services, from Hotmail and Teams to the NHS's 111 system. Financial institutions such as the London Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq have reported issues with their email accounts, although they have moved quickly to reassure people that their operations have not been affected.
Trades happening by fax in Japan
According to Bloomberg News, some firms in Japan have confirmed that trades are indeed happening by fax. A broker at the London brokerage firm Kyte Broking, Andy Kent, said the Microsoft outage has been more disruptive to processing trades than actually making them.
Kenneth Goh of UOB Kay Hian described the situation, saying: "It has been super irritating." Fewer trades are likely to be made today because of the technological setbacks caused by the outage, and all financiers can do now is wait until things are back to normal.
Microsoft working on a fix
Microsoft says it is continuing to work on a fix for the global outage that has affected a number of its products. The outage, which has caused issues for those using the 365 suite, Teams, Outlook and Copilot, began last night (November 12); the company admitted a fix is "not taking as expected".
At its peak last night, Downdetector showed more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems in the US, with over 3,000 reports in the UK. Although reports have now gone down, thousands still remain across multiple countries.
Impact on UK public services
The UK has also faced issues with police forces warning people to call rather than report crimes online, and people reportedly struggling to book appointments with their GP.
