Bloomberg Terminals Face Major Outage Disrupting Trading

LONDON, UK — Bloomberg’s financial terminals experienced a significant outage on Wednesday, disrupting trading and government bond auctions for countless financial professionals worldwide. The issue began early in the morning, resulting in delayed services and a lack of live pricing.

The Bloomberg terminals, which cost around $28,000 per year, are vital for many investment and trading activities. Users reported that they could not execute trades due to the system’s failure. Additionally, Bloomberg’s popular chat service was impacted, affecting real-time communication among traders.

By 11 a.m. UK time, Bloomberg announced that their systems were returning to normal, indicating that functionality had been largely restored about 90 minutes after the problems surfaced. The company released a statement saying, “Our systems are returning to normal operations and Terminal functionality has been restored following a service disruption earlier today.”

The disruption impacted debt sales in Europe significantly. For instance, the UK Debt Management Office, which was auctioning bonds due in 2031, extended the bidding window by an additional 90 minutes due to the technical difficulties. The auction ultimately succeeded, raising around $5.7 billion in bonds.

In Portugal, another debt auction scheduled for the morning was pushed back to the afternoon because of the outage. One London-based fund manager expressed frustration, stating, “We’ve been told not to trade. I can’t remember this level of non-functioning.” Another trader remarked, “Would you bet on a match that you can’t see or know the score?” Both noted a decline in trading volumes as a result of the outage.