Terminal outage caused significant disruptions in the global financial market

The Bloomberg terminal outage on April 20, 2022 caused significant disruptions in the global financial market, with traders unable to access live pricing information for approximately 90 minutes.

This affected trading activities, particularly during the UK and EU government debt auctions. The UK's Debt Management Office had to extend the bidding time for a gilts sale by 90 minutes, and the European Commission extended the deadline for an EU bond auction by an hour due to the issue. The outage also impacted the ability of traders to execute transactions and manage their workflows efficiently. Despite the disruption, Bloomberg's instant messaging service, known as IB, remained operational, allowing users to communicate and agree on deals for later execution. The company's statement acknowledged the service disruption and assured that their engineering team was working to resolve the problem. The incident highlighted the reliance of the financial industry on the Bloomberg terminal and the potential risks of overdependency on a single platform for critical market data and operations.