Advisors tackle Microsoft outage: Planning, flexibility, and smart workarounds
“[Our team] quickly started finding workarounds with each other,” said Liz Miller of Summit Place Financial Advisors
Like other sectors, the wealth management industry also felt the impact of the massive outage that hit Microsoft 365 services around the world Thursday, with the fallout continuing.
The outage struck a swathe of Microsoft services, including Outlook, the Teams messaging platform and the CoPilot AI tool, the Associated Press reports.
Advisors told InvestmentNews how they have been handling the epic outage. Liz Miller, president and founder of Summit Place Financial Advisors explained that quick onset of COVID-19 in 2020 taught valuable lessons about being prepared for flexible and changing work habits.
“The past 24 hours, we recalled that lesson a bit – email was down, but we have multiple ways to communicate with each other and our clients,” she said. “I was proud that our team first confirmed the challenge with each other and then quickly started finding workarounds with each other.”
“That is the sign of a trusting and well-run team,” added Miller, who is one of InvestmentNews’ 2026 5-Star Financial Planners and is last year’s CFP board chair.
Carolyn McClanahan, founder of Jacksonville, Fla.-based Life Planning Partners, said that the outage also affected her firm. “We sent a Constant Contact out to clients letting them know alternative ways to communicate,” she told InvestmentNews. “Thankfully, all of our other systems are functioning.”
“This is a perfect example of why there should not be monopolies in tech and why no advisor should have their entire tech stack with one provider,” added McClanahan, who was awarded the Alexandra Armstrong Lifetime Achievement Award by Investment News in 2024.
But Tyrone Ross, CEO of RIA firm 401 Financial, told InvestmentNews that his company successfully avoided the outage’s fallout. “We actually weren’t impacted thank God,” he said. “We’re big users of Google in our workflows.”
In a statement released on X early Friday, Microsoft said that it is seeing “encouraging recovery progress,” with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure.
“Some users may still experience intermittent issues as recovery actions continue,” the tech giant added. “We’re focused on recovery for the remaining affected environments while prioritizing email queue and backlog reduction.”
Microsoft explained that an extended 48-hour email timeout window remains in place to help protect delayed messages as delivery catches up.
On Friday afternoon Microsoft said that it does not have an ETA for full recovery yet. “As infrastructure stabilizes, we’re still draining queued messages and rebalancing traffic, so customers may see improved sign-in/access while delivery and processing continue to catch up,” it said.
Andrew Cohen contributed to this article.
