Computer crash causes world's financial markets to virtually grind to a halt

For almost three hours traders were unable to use the systems which give real-time information on shares, transactions and data

The failure led to the British Government delaying the sale of £3bn of UK debt because the Debt Management Office uses the Bloomberg terminals for buyers to place their bids (EPA)

The world’s financial markets virtually ground to a halt as Bloomberg financial platforms across the globe collapsed – leaving traders locked out of their terminals.

For almost three hours traders across London, New York and Hong Kong, among other financial hubs, were unable to use the systems which give real-time information on shares, transactions and data. Around 320,000 people around the world pay about $20,000 (£13,400) a year to use Bloomberg terminals.

The failure led to the British Government delaying the sale of £3bn of UK debt because the Debt Management Office uses the Bloomberg terminals for buyers to place their bids. It also meant there were around 200m fewer shares bought and sold on the London stock exchange than the same day a week earlier.

Bloomberg technicians desperately tried to fix the fault which caused phone lines at the company’s offices to become overwhelmed as many of the 325,000 subscribers tried to fix the faults. Current and former staff said they could not remember a similar meltdown of the service which is part of former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s company founded in 1981.

(Reuters)

Louis Gargour, the chief investment officer at asset manager LNG Capital, said: “The communication chat [on Bloomberg terminals] has become vital to the sharing of information across regions and counterparties. So a global outage such as this is systemically important to markets all around the world.”

Others saw the funny side, making jokes at Bloomberg’s expense, including pointing out the last tweet sent by Bloomberg before the outage was an article on the dangers of hackers.

Bloomberg said: “Service has been fully restored. 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.

“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.”