Faxes, phones and Bluetooth: Microsoft outage forces businesses to find fixes

By Iain Withers, Liang-sa Loh and Inti Landauro

LONDON/TAIPEI/PARIS, Nov 13 (Reuters) - Old-school technology including telephones, faxes and Bluetooth limited the damage for some people on Friday as a worldwide outage of Microsoft's Outlook left millions without email.

The prolonged disruption, which also hit Microsoft Teams and Copilot, affected some of the world's biggest institutions, from bankers and traders to shipping firms.

While most reported their core systems were still running, trading and administrative work slowed in places in the latest reminder of how much of the world's commerce, public services and communications run on a handful of technology providers.

"The pressure is mounting to invest in contingency plans and test whether those backups actually work when needed," said PP Foresight analyst Paolo Pescatore, adding that firms needed multiple providers for key services like communication and data storage.

Microsoft, which says on its website that more than 430 million people use its 365 services, blamed server problems and said it was not aware of any malicious activity. 

The disruption comes weeks after attacks on the industrial systems that keep supermarket food cold and shows how a single point of failure, whether a technical fault, cyberattack or even an extreme weather event, can disrupt everyday business.

In its latest update on Friday, Microsoft said it was seeing signs of stabilisation after implementing fixes more broadly to attain a persistent recovery of services.

European exchange operator Euronext, which runs bourses in Paris, Brussels, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Oslo, Athens and Milan, told listed companies to pick up the phone.

"We have ensured that the team has sufficient capacity to manage the situation and handle the additional workload," a spokesperson said, adding that Euronext was verifying the identity of callers to protect confidentiality and integrity.

Aviva, which reported earnings on Friday, said it had put backup plans in place, including sending out alternative phone numbers for earnings calls and using Bluetooth to transfer recordings because email was down.

The British insurer tested a similar-scale outage of its most critical technology systems about two weeks ago, CEO Amanda Blanc told Reuters. 

Shipping group Maersk asked customers to call with anything urgent and urged them to verify any unexpected communications about the outage with their local representative.

FAX MACHINES RETURN IN TAIPEI

In Taiwan, the outage disrupted fund management at securities firms, life insurers and investment trust companies, people familiar with the situation said.

At another financial firm, trades such as purchases and sales of short-term bills, which are normally confirmed by email, had to be confirmed by fax instead, one of the people said.

Foreign banks and financial institutions in Taiwan were hit especially hard, a trader said, because much of their data is emailed to overseas headquarters through Microsoft's systems.

In Britain, HSBC and Barclays activated internal incident teams to assess the impact, people within the banks told Reuters. While email systems were down, most client services were unaffected.

HSBC reminded staff not to use unauthorised channels such as personal email or WhatsApp to get around the outage, one said.

Two trading professionals said they observed lower trading volumes in some markets on Friday that they attributed to difficulties in executing trades. 

Caitlin Egen of Control Risks said that big global firms usually had contingency plans, but when key services went down abruptly it was still a "wake-up call".

"For a lot of businesses this morning, it's probably been chaos trying to figure out how to even get in touch with people," she said.

(Reporting by Harry Robertson, Iain Withers and Lawrence White in LONDON, Liang-sa Loh in TAIPEI, Inti Landauro in PARIS and Vera Dvorakova in GDANSK, Supantha Mukerhjee in STOCKHOLM and Toby Sterling in AMSTERDAM; Writing by Josephine Mason; Editing by Alexander Smith)