Bloomberg network stops trading, stays billion-dollar deals
Financial giant Bloomberg on Friday morning was hit by a network failure that crippled the global trading terminal network, which is used by more than 300,000 traders worldwide.
The outage, which lasted for about three hours, started just after 3 a.m. Eastern time. Bloomberg tweeted from its official account at 4:57 a.m. Eastern: “We are currently restoring service to those customers who were affected by today’s network issue and are investigating the cause.”
Another tweet said the problem was caused by “an internal network issue.”
Fortune reports the outage brought to a halt a planned sale of $4.5 billion in treasury notes by the United Kingdom’s Debt Management office.
Many traders and industry analysts took to Twitter to air their grievances under the hashtag #bloombergdown.
Lou Whiteman tweeted: “Millions of traders are looking out the window for the first time in years.”
Mark Thompson tweeted: “Traders were forced to pick up the phone and talk to each other today.”
It appears many traders, not able to access Bloomberg terminals, turned to a rival service from Reuters.
Kit Lowe tweeted: “Available to lease: one Reuters terminal (hourly rates available).”
