Bloomberg Terminal Outage: Financial markets data service platform disrupts UK, EU bonds auction

Bloomberg, the financial data service used by traders around the world, was hit by an outage on Wednesday, briefly disrupting auctions of UK and EU bonds.

The Bloomberg terminal is the crown jewel of the media empire founded by US billionaire Michael Bloomberg in 1981 and counts some 350,000 users worldwide. 

The service, which costs subscribers tens of thousands of dollars a year, is ubiquitous in trading rooms, providing live pricing of company stocks, currencies, commodities, bonds and other financial instruments.

Traders and investors also use it for its news content and analytics and to exchange messages with peers around the world.

But several of its functions stopped working or came to a crawl on Wednesday.

"Our systems are returning to normal operations and Terminal functionality has been restored following a service disruption earlier today," Bloomberg spokesman Ty Trippet said in a statement. 

The company's help desk had told AFP at around 0900 GMT that a "technical issue" was affecting multiple clients and technicians were working to resolve the problem.

The service started working again but slower at around 1000 GMT.

"Due to global technical problems with Bloomberg, the EU postpones the deadline for today's EUB auction by 1 hour... to ensure a smooth functioning of the auction," the European Commission said in a statement.

The UK Debt Management Office also said it had to extend the bidding window for a government debt auction due to the "market-wide Bloomberg system issues". 

The bidding window closed later, at 1030 GMT.

"It's a mess. It's blocking business," Gregoire Kounowski, an investment adviser at London-based wealth manager Norman K., told AFP.

Giles Plump, a London-based copper trader at US financial services firm StoneX, told AFP that price feeds were "very intermittent" and some functions were not loading, but those were "not major problems" for him.

A trader in Dubai, who declined to give his name, said the terminal was "down" and "sometimes flickers back to life for five seconds".

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