Things are now back up and running following a global outage of the Bloomberg Terminal on the morning of 21 May, The TRADE understands.
One buy-side trader tells The TRADE that whilst Bloomberg was down it got “a bit chaotic”, with internal instructions given for “only essential orders” due to live prices being delayed.
Another concurred that it was chaos “for a couple of hours” on their desk also, adding: “Everyone was asking for our phone numbers ‘just in case’”.
The outage affected the fixed income space in particular, with bond deals delayed.
Given the huge amount of new issuances today the outage was particularly badly timed, a trader confirmed.
In an announcement this morning, the United Kingdom Debt Management office communicated that “due to the ongoing market-wide Bloomberg system issues” there would be an extension of the bidding window for the auction of 4% treasury gilt 2031. The window closed at 11.30am.
On social media platform ‘X’ (formerly Twitter) several users – including traders – reported “blank screens”, as one user lamented, “Bloomberg has gone down. This is a fate worse than death”.
The Bloomberg Terminal costs firms almost £24,000 a year for a single license.
When approached by The TRADE, Ty Trippet, Bloomberg spokesman, said: “Our systems are returning to normal operations and Terminal functionality has been restored following a service disruption earlier today.”
He further told The TRADE at 12.51pm UK that the issue had been “fully resolved” following an “internal issue”.
Just yesterday, 20 May, Bloomberg confirmed that it had expanded its Instant Bloomberg (IB) chatbot solution with an add-on service. The move allows Bloomberg Anywhere users to interact with multiple firms by bringing in-house proprietary bots to IB chat rooms.
Read more: Market outages and resiliency a must watch area for market participants going forward
The outage of the data platform is likely to spur on ongoing analysis by regulators globally over the stability and resilience of both exchanges and the surrounding technological infrastructure across the trading sphere.
In 2024, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) set out plans to create a taskforce to work on “good practices” in relation to conduct during exchange outages, as part of a secondary markets overhaul – announced in May. ESMA has also previously outlined its view on upping the resiliency of trading venues in times of market outages.