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.

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.