Morgan Stanley is currently experiencing an outage across their wealth management trading operations internally; as well as the client facing website and app. In the midst of historic market volaitility, a pandemic, and a fear index that has reached historic levels – Morgan Stanley clients are in the dark.
As it stands right now, the operations team is furiously working to fix whatever has the current system down and clients are being called to avoid any sort of panic. As of yet the markets have yet to react to this development, but if it stretches out any further, there could be ripples that make their way into the broader markets.
Morgan Stanley is considered the largest wealth management operation in the Unites States given their total financial advisor headcount. Beyond that they compete directly with the likes of Goldman Sachs, Barclays, J. P. Morgan and others for institutional deal flow, and other ‘high-minded’ finance work product. This kind of outage will bring up serious questions from potential ‘clients of scale’ on the institutional side of things as well.
As of this moment, the outage still remains…developing.
In a note sent to advisors, Morgan Stanley acknowledged the outage and attempted some level of guidance: “[O]rder entry and order status continues to experience issues and may be unavailable,” the company ,essaged to wealth management “field and operations” employees near 1PM. A second message said, advisors were told that “multiple applications are experiencing latency or may be unstable. Technology is aware and investigating.”
As of 2:50PM the systems remain down. Developing.
