LONDON — Bloomberg LP’s trading terminals, which are used by most of the world’s biggest financial firms, went down for a few hours Friday because of apparent technical problems, a crash that prompted the British government to postpone a planned $4.4 billion debt issue.
Users said the outage began as trading was about to get in full swing around 8 a.m. in London, which along with New York is one of the world’s largest financial centers, particularly in foreign exchange and bond markets. When trading began in the U.S. a few hours later, most customers were up and running.
By day’s end in London, Bloomberg said its service had been “fully restored.” In a statement, it said hardware and software failures in its network caused excessive volumes that led to customer disconnections as a result of the machines being overwhelmed.
“We discovered the root cause quickly, isolated the faulty hardware and restarted the software,” it added. “We are reviewing our multiple redundant systems, which failed to prevent this disruption.”
