Email systems at the world’s largest real estate company, CBRE (CBRE), crashed late Monday night, leaving the company’s thousands of U.S. employees without access to their company email accounts this week.
According to a source, the problem arose at a data and technology facility the Fortune 500 company operates in Dallas, which is the central hub for its domestic email system. Servers that were set to be replaced began malfunctioning this person said, bringing the email system down.
Technicians have been working to install replacement units the source said and as of Thursday morning, the problem appeared to have been largely resolved.
The crash left the company’s dozens of U.S. offices with spotty or disabled email service for at least two days, forcing executives to use personal emails in order to send business communications.
“Our U.S. email system was offline intermittently on Tuesday and Wednesday this week due to a server failure,” a CBRE spokesman said in a statement to The Commercial Observer. “During this time, our people worked creatively and diligently to serve clients through alternate means of communications. Email functionality was restored for the majority of our people nationally on Wednesday and for all of our people on Thursday morning. As always, we remained highly responsive to our clients’ needs during the email interruption.”
If there was any upside to the situation, it was that it came at a fortunate time; the week before Labor Day is a period when the real estate business nationwide usually is slow and brokers at the firm are away on vacation.
At least some CBRE executives in the company’s New York offices were able to use their accounts through the problems using a temporary system, some brokers at the company said.
The technology gaffe comes at a firm that is known for its strength in that area of the business. CBRE compiles comprehensive real estate market analytics and has computer database systems that carefully track the nation’s real estate markets and its inventory of space.
