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A user at the New York Stock Exchange accesses the Bloomberg terminal, which is used to place trades and monitor real-time financial data. Photo: EPA

The day the Bloomberg screens went blank

Britain postponed a sale of treasury bills yesterday as traders around the world were hit by a "global network problem" that affected terminals supplied by news and market price provider Bloomberg.

Britain postponed a sale of treasury bills yesterday as traders around the world were hit by a "global network problem" that affected terminals supplied by news and market price provider Bloomberg.

Social media first reported the Bloomberg systems going down at 3.20pm and the screens were blank for most of the following two hours, market participants said.

At 6pm, Bloomberg tweeted: "We are currently restoring service to those customers who were affected by today's network issue and are investigating the cause."

It later said there was no sign that the major outage had an external cause and that it had restored service to most customers.

"There is no indication at this point that this is anything other than an internal network issue," it said.

Last night, terminal users in Hong Kong said most of its 3,000 functions seemed to have returned to normal but real-time pricing remained slow.

Britain's Debt Management Office had planned a regular sale of £3 billion (HK$34.9 billion) of treasury bills but said any bids already submitted would be deemed null and void. The sale was postponed to later in the day.

It is believed to be the first time the office has postponed a tender under such circumstances. When asked about the cause of the postponement, a spokesman for the office referred to reports of an outage of Bloomberg trading terminals.

Users reported problems with the machines starting in the last hour of trading in Hong Kong and were unable to reconnect by the market close at 4pm, two traders at major banks based in Hong Kong said.

Ben Kwong Man-bun, a director of KGI Asia, said: "It certainly had impact, in particular on our teams that need to use the terminal to do price and trade."

An equity trader with a European investment bank, who declined to be named, said: "It was very unusual to have the Bloomberg terminal go down for more than 10 minutes since the US data provider has multiple contingency plans.

"I think Bloomberg should consider making its services for free to all of its users globally for the year."

He said he had been using the terminal for more than 10 years.

Bloomberg charges US$24,000 a year for one terminal subscription. According to its website, there are more than 320,000 subscribers globally using the terminal.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: The day the Bloomberg screens went blank
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