Bloomberg Outage Could Open Doors to Alternatives

Abstract

It does not take much to send financial markets up or down. A report from the Federal Reserve, a release of consumer data, a jobs report, political news, or even weather reports (like a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico) and result in a jump or fall in the stock, bond or commodities markets depending on the perceived impact of the news. But it takes lot to actually shut down those markets. For a few hours in the early morning of Friday, April 17, something happened which–while not completely shutting the markets down–had nearly the same effect. Bloomberg went down. Specifically, the servers that operate a global array of some 320,000 financial data, analytics, real-time news and instant messaging terminals shut down and was off line for a several hour period. The outage happened near the end of the Asian markets trading day on Thursday, April16th. The outage hit the US markets before dawn hours on the early morning of Friday, the 17th but impacted the European markets as they were opening or during their heaviest business hours. In tweets from its Twitter feed, Bloomberg blamed thought “disruption” to an “internal network issue”, and denied that it was the result of hacking or other external attack.