Microsoft's Outlook blackout pushed trading desks from Sydney to Tokyo back onto telephones, fax machines and WhatsApp on Friday, holding up confirmations and back-office settlement at banks and brokers worldwide.
The disruption also hit Teams and Copilot and drew about 200,000 user reports on Downdetector, The Straits Times reported. Microsoft stock slipped 0.4% after hours.
Rita Elkazzi, UBS Group's head of execution sales for Australia and New Zealand, said the timing was poor. "It's been a bit of a disaster, and I can't believe still not resolved," the Sydney-based banker told The Straits Times, saying the situation demanded "a lot more diligence on ensuring trade recaps, et cetera, are accurate".
In Singapore, Eugene Koh, a sales trader at CMC Markets, said staff reverted to older methods. "Everyone was back on the phone, and our WhatsApp chats were busier than usual," he said. A task that takes a second by email could now need a call and several minutes.
Ryutaro Kimura, a senior bond strategist at BNP Paribas Asset Management in Tokyo, said trading itself was largely unaffected, but "confirmations backed up, creating settlement headaches for back offices". "Desks were still getting trades done by phone and fax," he added.
Calvin Yeoh, a portfolio manager at hedge fund BlueEdge Advisors, said he could not check email and was struggling to reach brokerage reports and trading platforms that require email authentication. "Outlook is the appendix of the modern financial operations world," he told The Straits Times.
Kenneth Goh, director of private wealth management at UOB Kay Hian, was travelling in Malaysia and relying on patchy phone calls to reach clients during a volatile week for markets. "If the outage crosses 24 hours, then we'd be in the red zone," he said.
The fallout spread well beyond trading floors. Australia's bourse operator ASX told clients that some Microsoft 365 services, email among them, were affected, while its own market operations were running normally, The Straits Times reported. In Japan, the finance ministry said it was unable to receive email, and the government's shared IT platform was also disrupted.
Workhorse Group, a US maker of trucks and buses, pushed back its earnings release. IIFL Capital Services, an Indian brokerage, told clients that emailed queries could take longer to answer. Hindustan Times reported that confirmations and settlements slipped as traders fell back on calls, messaging apps and fax.
Microsoft says more than 430 million people use its 365 services. In its latest update, the company said it was "seeing positive results with our efforts to restart affected infrastructure", after earlier blaming server problems and saying it had no indication of malicious activity, as GlobeTV reported.
Paolo Pescatore, an analyst at PP Foresight, told CNA that the episode should push companies to spread their risk. "The pressure is mounting to invest in contingency plans and test whether those backups actually work when needed," he said.
At Wilson Asset Management, portfolio manager Matthew Haupt said his firm's small-cap team had seen equity volumes drop during the blackout.