Bloomberg Trading Terminals Go Down for Hours

Bloomberg's trading terminals, which are used by most of the world's biggest financial firms, went down for two and a half hours today due to apparent technical problems, a development that prompted the British government to postpone a planned $4.4 billion debt issue. Users say the outage started as trading was getting in full swing around 8am in London. A market analyst at IG in London says he can't remember anything similar ever occurring with Bloomberg but that the terminals appear to be working normally again. He says the impact on markets and businesses was likely tempered by the fact that most trading firms have both Reuters and Bloomberg terminals "just for this eventuality."

No one at Bloomberg LP was available to explain the outage, which users say is a rare phenomenon for the firm started by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg in the early 1980s. Around 7:30am ET Bloomberg tweeted, "Service now restored to most customers following disruption to parts of our network. Making progress bringing the full network back online." Some Bloomberg customers took the outage with humor, joking about it on social media. Some quipped that Greece should have defaulted during the blackout and no one would have known better, others that it was time for an early trip to the pub—having drinks on Friday is popular in London's trading community. (More Bloomberg LP stories.)