Mortgage brokers swap Teams calls for FaceTime and phone as Microsoft 365 failure hits the working week
A global Microsoft 365 outage that began on Thursday evening left UK mortgage brokers scrambling for workarounds on Friday, disrupting client calls, lender communications and document management on the busiest day of the week for property completions.
The failure, which knocked out Outlook, Teams and SharePoint, was confirmed by Microsoft as affecting users across 74 countries. It was still not fully resolved as British offices opened this morning, with Microsoft warning that restored services could become unresponsive again. Brokers already managing tight completion deadlines found the outage exposed just how thoroughly the industry's day-to-day operations now depend on a single technology provider.
Katherine Stagg (pictured left top), founder and managing director of Stagg Mortgage Services, said the impact was immediate and widespread. "We've come in early to do what we need to do, we've got a target to meet, and our systems are still working, but everything that we're going to do, we can't do it," she told Mortgage Introducer. "I didn't actually realise how much I relied on it until it doesn't work. Everything is based on your calendar, your emails, your Copilot – everything you can't do."
Stagg said her team has resorted to WhatsApp to receive documents from clients, after one buyer sent bank statements through the messaging app when email proved inaccessible. "We can see the emails on our phones, but we can't forward them or anything," she added. "So we're finding alternative ways."
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Lenders feel the strain too
The disruption is not limited to broker firms. Stagg noted that lenders were also struggling, with business development managers (BDMs) reaching out via WhatsApp to flag that their own systems were down. "I spoke to a BDM from a lender, and it's just crazy because literally they said, ‘we just can't do anything’," she said. Stagg expects a surge of queued messages once the outage clears: "On the flip side of it, it's going to be an all-weekend job to sort through the emails."
Paul Hampton (pictured top right), owner and mortgage consultant at Approved Mortgage Solutions, said his firm has found workable alternatives quickly. With three Teams-based client appointments booked for the morning, Hampton said he has quickly pivoted to alternatives. "One of them will just be replaced with a telephone call rather than a Teams call. And the other two, I think we're just going to do FaceTime," he told Mortgage Introducer. "So we can still do the video calls, that's not the end of the world."
Hampton added that his firm's customer relationship management (CRM) system, provided by HLP, operates independently of Microsoft, meaning advisers could still log fact-finds, store documents and produce suitability letters without interruption. "The functionality of our CRM system is not touched at all," he said. Email, Teams and the firm's Microsoft-hosted client document store were the main casualties.
The email problem
Both brokers identified email as the most damaging single point of failure. Friday is traditionally the busiest day of the week for UK property completions, with conveyancers, lenders and brokers relying on email to confirm that mortgage funds have moved, keys can be released and transactions are finalised. A broken email chain on completion day can delay a transaction even when the funds themselves are ready, pushing completions into the following week and leaving buyers and sellers in limbo.
Hampton said lenders would likely be "inundated with telephone calls" from brokers unable to get updates through email, with waiting times set to suffer as a result. "Where brokers would normally just rely on emails for updates, they're going to have to call up to get updates. I would imagine the waiting time to get through to lenders is going to be horrendous, but it's not the end of the world. We can work around it."
Stagg's experience prompted reflection on the industry's broader relationship with technology. Asked whether the outage might push firms to review how much they depend on a single provider, she is sceptical that the industry's enthusiasm for AI would survive a day like this.
A reminder to have a contingency plan
As reported earlier on Friday, brokers with clients in active chains are advised to pick up the phone, stay alert to fraud risk, and treat any instruction to change bank details with extreme scepticism until normal communications are restored – outages are frequently exploited by fraudsters posing as conveyancers or lenders with updated payment details. The latest developments on when Microsoft Outlook will be working again are being updated as the firm provides more information.
Hampton remains confident in technology overall. "I think you can still rely on it," he said. "You've just got to have a backup contingency. It just shows you that you should always have a contingency plan as a business."
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