Mortgage and real estate executives attending HousingWire‘s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Summit in Dallas on Tuesday have already begun to collect some lessons learned from Friday’s global tech outage as the world is still dealing with its consequences.
Different companies were impacted to different degrees by the problem, but executives said it validates their decision to invest in in-house technology, develop virtual workspaces for employees and signals the need to adopt AI to predict and prevent these events.
The tech outage, which impacted Microsoft Windows computer systems and its Azure cloud service running software from technology security firm CrowdStrike, has led to cascading issues in multiple industries — including technology, health care, air travel and emergency services.
In the mortgage and real estate space, Abhinav Asthana, head of product at Tavant, said that most of his clients did not rely only on the Microsoft system but also on Amazon, Google or their own private cloud systems, which reduced their exposure to the outage.
That’s also the case for Tavant itself. According to Asthana, only a small percentage of the technology company’s employees rely on Windows systems, and the impact was not that relevant because they have virtual workspaces.
“That means that if you’re not able to get a Windows machine, you’re getting your replacement machine immediately, with a virtual workstation that gives you access to the same library where you can do your job,” Asthana said. “Now, obviously, that’s where you see a little contrast with airlines, where the whole reservation system is sitting on Azure server.”
Asthana said Tavant is still “working through solving problems with Windows machines” while taking the workforce away from them. “We cannot have people log into workspaces with no endpoint protection. That’s important for us,” he said.
On stage, Alisande Heriyanto, vice president of product and tech support at The Corcoran Group, added that Friday’s episode shows that “we shouldn’t put our eggs in one basket as far as any specific technology.”
Build vs. buy
Several mortgage companies said they have relied on in-house technology to control their processes and make their businesses less vulnerable to external issues. That’s the case for United Wholesale Mortgage (UWM).
“I subscribe wholly to a build versus buy mentality. Not everybody can do that. But I subscribe to this mainly because I’m a control freak,” Jason Bressler, chief technology officer at UWM, said on stage. “At the end of the day, a lot of us want to control our own destiny. We don’t want to rely on other people.”
“We are missing people [at this conference] here because of the CrowdStrike issue. That was a very eye-opening experience. And there’s all kinds of companies that are still suffering from this,” Bressler added. “We were affected exactly the same way because we use Microsoft as our back end for our infrastructure. But we were able to recover in a matter of hours because everything was in-house.”
Chris Cox, chief technology and digital officer at Keller Williams, said that looking ahead, companies can use AI to “predict and prevent” events like the CrowdStrike outage.
The CEO of a tech vendor for the mortgage servicing industry who attended the AI Summit said that his teams in the U.S. and India were still facing issues with Microsoft systems four days after the problem disrupted different sectors.
David Weston, vice president of enterprise and OS security at Microsoft, told customers in a statement on Saturday that the company was “working around the clock and providing ongoing updates and support.”
“While software updates may occasionally cause disturbances, significant incidents like the
CrowdStrike event are infrequent,” Weston wrote. “We currently estimate that CrowdStrike’s update affected 8.5 million Windows devices, or less than 1% of all Windows machines. While the percentage was small, the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises that run many critical services.”
In the mortgage industry, the tech outage caused some disruptions in certain core services, such as the Federal Housing Administration‘s (FHA) Connection portal, which provides FHA-approved lenders and business partners with secure online access to computer systems at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
ICE Mortgage Technologies also confirmed that the incident impacted its Encompass loan origination system, while the Nationwide Multistate Licensing System (NMLS) said it “was impacted briefly.” FHA, ICE and NMLS said their systems were restored on Friday.
