A Bloomberg terminal is seen inside a kiosk on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange April 17, 2015. An outage at news and market data provider Bloomberg LP hit financial markets around the world on Friday, prompting debt sales to be postponed and exacerbating a spike in volatility in European stocks.Brendan McDermid/Reuters
Currency strategist Camilla Sutton got into her downtown Toronto office this morning at the ungodly hour of 4:30 a.m. Today was no ordinary day, though. Her Bloomberg terminal was down.
"I could look up where the dollar was trading but I couldn't really see where it was trading in relation to everyone else at the same time, what had happened in rates markets, what had happened in equities. You're kind of blind to the news flow," said Ms. Sutton, who is chief FX strategist with Bank of Nova Scotia.
The outage that hit Scotiabank wasn't confined to Canada. Bloomberg Professional service terminals, which are ubiquitous in the financial services industry, went dark around the world. The interruption had a significant if transitory effect on global markets, and even prompted the U.K.'s debt management office to postpone a £3-billion ($5.5-billion) bond issue.
Bloomberg is used by financial professionals to monitor dizzying amounts of data, execute trades and analyze asset classes in real time. According to the company, the Bloomberg Professional service has more than 320,000 subscribers. Its biggest competitor is Thomson Reuters' Eikon platform. (Woodbridge Co. Ltd., the holding company of the Thomson Family, is the majority owner of The Globe and Mail.)
Judging from a torrent of tweets, the Bloomberg outage started around 3 a.m. ET and lasted for a few hours.
At 9:58 a.m. ET, Bloomberg LP tweeted, "Service has been fully restored. We apologize to our customers for the disruption"
In a statement emailed to The Globe and Mail, a Bloomberg spokesperson blamed the outage on "a combination of hardware and software failures in the network, which caused an excessive volume of network traffic."
The company added that it "discovered the root cause quickly, isolated the faulty hardware, and restarted the software."
"You realize how reliant you are on it when it's not there." Ms. Sutton admitted. "I'm trying to get out a morning document out and talk about where currencies are, where the big drivers are and it's hard to do without [the Bloomberg]."
In the meantime, she was forced to use the same research tool as the rest of us who don't pay a $21,000 (U.S.) yearly subscription fee for a Bloomberg terminal – the boring old internet.
Ms. Sutton's Bloomberg came back around 5:15.a.m and she was able to get back to work at full capacity. Not everyone at her shop found the Bloomberg outage so disruptive, however. The currency traders and sales team at Scotiabank had access to other systems like those offered by Thomson Reuters and EBS.
"When Bloomberg goes down, it's easy for them to just switch [to another service], particularly in FX which traditionally has been an asset class that hasn't been tied into just Bloomberg."
Niall McGee