Microsoft outage forces traders to use phones, fax machines

This outage underscores how much market infrastructure still depends on a single software stack, and how quickly participants fall back to manual, voice and even fax-based workflows when it fails. The disruption hit exchanges and brokers across Europe and Asia, but the reported impact was on communications and financing processes rather than core matching engines, which limits the immediate market-wide risk. The open question is whether firms treat this as a one-off or accelerate contingency planning for messaging and settlement-adjacent workflows.