Last Friday's global cyber-attack by unknown hackers across numerous businesses around the world wasn't the only negative technology-related development. Less widely publicized was a system-wide technology outage at one of the country's independent broker-dealers, LPL Financial.

At some point on Friday, LPL's 15,000 advisors were no longer able to access its Charlotte, N.C.-based data center, causing much of the firm's technology platform to become unusable. As the outage unfolded, the company's phone systems were unable to keep up with demand, leaving many LPL-affiliated advisors in the dark.

Advisors were notified about the outage via a memo from Andy Kalbaugh, Divisional President of National Sales at LPL, that was obtained by FA magazine that explained that the outage was not caused by a cyber attack, but something much more mundane: a utility outage.

In a company statement released this week, LPL explained that its systems did not actually go down, but access to its platform was severed due to damage to fiber optic cables serving the company's data center.

“Last Friday at 2:38 p.m. ET, a construction crew damaged underground cables that provide critical network connectivity for LPL." said LPL. "Our back-up connection experienced an unrelated technical issue and was unable to provide support as planned. As a result, advisors and clients were unable to access our systems, and our customer service phone capacity was severely degraded. The cables were repaired Saturday and our systems are all fully operational. We regret the inconvenience this outage caused our advisors and clients, and are evaluating options to further improve resiliency.”

Most surprising was the failure of many LPL backup systems, which either failed to activate or were inaccessible to advisors during the outage. Outages lasting an hour or two hit brokerage firms fairly often, but in most cases they have backup or alternative technology systems that are triggered to provide support while the front-end system is repaired.

Sources from within the LPL advisor community stated that the outage started "first thing in the morning" on Friday, not the afternoon, and lasted well into Saturday afternoon, when the company's technology platforms were fixed. During this time, approximately 15,000 financial advisors supported by LPL were unable to perform basic business processing functions.

"It was very chaotic," said one LPL-affiliated financial advisor, who asked not to be identified by name. "Nothing could get done, because nothing was working. BranchNet, ClientWorks, AccountView all just went off-line and stayed that way for one and a half days," said the advisor, referencing a number of LPL's key advisor-facing and client-facing technology platforms. "Worse yet, even the LPL phone system stopped working."

An operations executive at an independent hybrid RIA firm supported by LPL noted that "none of LPL's backup or technology systems went into action as the company had always promised they would in the event of an outage. The technology systems went down, and they stayed down. The lack of a reliable contingency system is what's really troubling here."

Others within the industry were more optimistic.

A technology consultant familiar with LPL said, "It's obviously never a good thing to have thousands of advisors across the country immobilized thanks to a technology outage. But the silver lining is that this happened at the end of the trading week, during a time when markets weren't especially volatile. If an outage of this magnitude and duration happened at the same time as a giant market movement that advisors would need to act on quickly, that would have been potentially catastrophic. LPL will hopefully benefit from this extreme stress-testing of their technology systems, and find ways to mitigate defects to avoid a future recurrence."