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Bloomberg, the markets data and media service, suffered widespread disruption on Wednesday morning that prevented traders from accessing live pricing and pushed back UK and EU sovereign debt auctions.
Users complained that the $28,000-a-year Bloomberg terminal service was running with significant delays and that the absence of live pricing prevented them from carrying out trades.
By 11am on Wednesday, users of the terminal reported that services appeared to have been restored almost 90 minutes after the problems were first reported.
In a statement late on Wednesday morning, Bloomberg said: “Our systems are returning to normal operations and Terminal functionality has been restored following a service disruption earlier today.”
Traders and investors have become highly reliant on the company’s distinctive black and orange terminals in the 35 years since it was founded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg.
The terminal carries pricing and analytics on stocks and bonds around the world and is widely used by traders and bankers to exchange messages, making it one of the global financial system’s main arteries.
“We’ve been told not to trade. I can’t remember this level of non-functioning,” said one London-based fund manager on Wednesday.
“Would you bet on a match that you can’t see or know the score?” another said, adding that trading volumes were lower as a result.
Although there are alternative data providers, including LSEG’s Workspace and FactSet, Bloomberg is widely regarded as the gold standard for the financial services industry.
One European investor said the disruption was a “reminder of overdependencies” in the market.
The outage disrupted the auctions of UK and EU government debt, with the Debt Management Office extending the bidding time for a gilts sale by 90 minutes and the European Commission extending the deadline for an auction of EU bonds by an hour.
Two large investment banks confirmed that their trading operations had been disrupted by the outage, with a person at one of the banks saying “traders couldn’t access pricing data [for the Gilt auction] and no client orders were taken as a result”.
Traders said that Bloomberg’s instant messaging service — known as IB — was still functioning as normal throughout the period of disruption, enabling them to strike deals with other users for settlement later.
The Bloomberg help desk had posted a message at 9.55am on Wednesday, which said: “We’re currently experiencing a global terminal issue, and our engineering team is actively working to identify and resolve the problem.”
“I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, and we truly appreciate your patience and understanding in the meantime,” it added.
One portfolio manager at a large asset manager complained that not only trades, but also his entire workflow, had been disrupted due to the outage.
“This is so frustrating . . . I am unable to run my day-to-day process. Not only trades, I have a presentation coming up where I need spreadsheets that are Bloomberg-based to work,” he said.
Additional reporting by Mari Novik, Simon Foy and Robert Smith
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