Russell Sessions had a client exchanging on a property on Friday. To complete, his firm needed to confirm it had seen the lease and sign it for the client's solicitors, but with Outlook down the client could not get the document across. When Insurance Business UK called, Sessions, managing director of Vizion Insurance Brokers, was texting the client to find another way to send it. "Obviously no one has faxes anymore," he said.
The Microsoft outage, which began on Thursday evening and was still disrupting Outlook on Friday, has not impacted brokers evenly. For some it has stalled live business. For others it amounts to a quiet day and some extra admin.
For Sessions, the bigger problem comes when service returns. "We communicate with our clients over email on a day-to-day basis, certainly from a corporate level," he said. "We're going to struggle to catch up."
He said the outage would set the firm back "massively" on workload once everything held up starts arriving, and his team, working remotely on Friday, was already discussing whether people would log on over the weekend.
Kirsty McCallum of Prizm Solutions said their team was getting work ready to go. "All everybody's doing is prepping things in preparation to send them when we get email back again," she said.
The firm has had only a few client calls. "I just don't know if people are just not doing anything because they can't," she said. "It's one of those situations because everybody's in the same boat."
Martin Castleton, managing director of Aureum Insurance Brokers, said clients had not been calling with concerns.
"I'm not aware that it's impacting anything significant as in critical," he said. "It's just the admin side of things. So I think everyone's been trading as normal."
It was still early, he added, and that could change.
McCallum questioned whether a backlog will build at all. If nobody can do anything, she said, "there's going to be nothing to catch up on, is there?" Whatever the restart brings, she is leaving it for Monday morning.
All three firms are working around the same failure, at the same time, as is much of the rest of the market.
"What events like this do show is why insurers pay close attention to concentration risk," said Ed Ventham, co-founder and director of Assured. "When a single provider failure can affect thousands of organisations at once, it has widespread consequences for the entire industry, far beyond the scope of one organisation's policy."
For now, the risk brokers can point to sits in the routine changes clients have not been able to make. McCallum had been worried about fleet clients needing to take vehicles off cover or put them on, but the firm has heard little so far. Whether that quiet means nothing has changed, or that changes are waiting to land once email returns, may not be clear until Monday.
Until Microsoft marks the incident resolved, brokers have little choice but to work around it and wait.
