Bloomberg Outage Hits Traders, Disrupts Government-Bond Auctions

 Bloomberg’s financial terminals, an essential tool for many professional investors, suffered an outage early Wednesday, disrupting trading and some offerings of government bonds.

The terminal, which costs tens of thousands of dollars a year, is one of the most widely employed platforms for traders to access live prices, data and news they need to inform their investment decisions.

“Our systems are returning to normal operations and terminal functionality has been restored following a service disruption earlier today,” said Ty Trippet, a Bloomberg spokesman. A help-desk representative had earlier described the problem as a global terminal issue affecting some clients.

The terminal is the centerpiece of Michael Bloomberg’s closely held, namesake company. Founded in 1981, the firm has grown into a juggernaut provider of financial data and business news with estimated annual revenues of more than $13 billion, according to Forbes. Bloomberg himself is worth close to $105 billion, according to Forbes.

The company charges $28,300 a year for each terminal for firms with multiple subscriptions, according to Burton-Taylor International Consulting. At the end of last year, Bloomberg had more than 355,000 terminal users, placing it among the top three financial-data providers alongside LSEG and S&P Global, the consulting firm estimates.

Wednesday’s glitch held up debt sales in Europe. The U.K. Debt Management Office, which was auctioning bonds due in 2031, gave investors an extra 90 minutes to bid. It ultimately concluded the auction successfully, selling the equivalent of $5.7 billion of bonds.

In Portugal, a similar debt sale that was due to take place in the late morning was pushed back into the afternoon.

During the disruption, which lasted for the bulk of the morning trading session in the U.K., prices across asset classes weren’t updating, including those for stocks, currencies and debt, said one London-based hedge-fund manager. The chat service that many traders and investors use to communicate with each other in real time was also down, the investor said.

Financial markets are occasionally buffeted by outages at exchanges or at trading-and-data platforms. Bloomberg terminals went down a decade ago, prompting the U.K. to delay a debt buyback.

Bloomberg has an agreement with Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, to distribute news. The companies’ newswire services compete.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/bloomberg-outage-hits-traders-disrupts-government-bond-auctions/ar-AA1FbVwA