Financial
software and data provider Bloomberg has apologized for an IT meltdown which
affected its 320,000 users' terminals around the world. A weekly bond sale in
London had to be delayed.
Deutsche Welle, 18 April 2015
The whole
of the London trading day had passed before Bloomberg could announce the
situation had been resolved.
Problems
began on Friday morning in London as Asian markets closed and Europe's opened
at 8.20 am London time. Trading screens were blank for most of the following
two hours. By the time US markets opened, most Bloomberg terminals were back up
and running.
Bloomberg's
screens are used by traders of government bonds as well as shares and other
financial instruments.
The company
issued a statement explaining the problem: “We experienced a combination of
hardware and software failures in the network, which caused an excessive volume
of network traffic."
"This
led to customer disconnections as a result of the machines being
overwhelmed," Bloomberg explained.
"We
discovered the root cause quickly, isolated the faulty hardware, and restarted
the software. We are reviewing our multiple redundant systems, which failed to
prevent this disruption," the company added.
The US firm
said there had not been a cyber attack.
Around 4pm
local time in London, Bloomberg tweeted: “Service has been fully restored. We
apologise to our customers for the disruption.”
According
to Fortune, 320,000 people worldwide use Bloomberg terminals, which cost about
$20,000 (18,500 euros) a year. A significant number were affected by the IT
problem on Friday.
The UK Debt
Management Office postponed its weekly tender of Treasury bills on Friday
morning, but was able to carry out the debt sale in the afternoon.
Telephone
and Twitter
During the
day, as traders were unable to use their terminals, they placed their orders by
telephone instead. The volume of trading in German Bund futures during the two
hour period when screens were blank was down by about a third compared with the
same period in the previous Friday trading sessions. Traders also took to
Twitter under the hashtag #bloombergdown:
Maybe it could be a Blockbuster #BloombergDown pic.twitter.com/8KTHconmNp
— Advisory Desk (@advdesk) 17 april 2015
The outage
was a signal of how dependent traders have become on Bloomberg terminals, and
the 'chat' facility for reaching their clients. It was also an indicator of
Bloomberg's dominant place in the trading terminal market.
The
Bloomberg data terminals are the center of the business empire that Michael R.
Bloomberg founded in 1981. He returned to lead the company last year after
serving three terms as mayor of New York City.
Bloomberg
has become the world's biggest financial information provider, overtaking rival
Reuters. The company is privately held and is not obliged to divulge financial
information. In September it said revenue grew to more than $9 billion in 2014.
jm/bw (Reuters, AP)
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