Bloomberg’s global network of financial computing terminals was down for hours on Friday, sparking a morning disruption in international markets.
Service for some terminals was out for multiple hours and started shortly after markets opened in Europe.
{mosads}The company appeared to dismiss any indication that it was caused by a cyberattack but has yet to clarify what brought the network down.
“There is no indication at this point that this is anything other than an internal network issue,” the company said in a tweet.
Full service was restored around 11 a.m., it said.
“We experienced a combination of hardware and software failures in the network, which caused an excessive volume of network traffic,” it added in a separate statement. “This 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.
“We are reviewing our multiple redundant systems, which failed to prevent this disruption.”
In the few hours while the system was down, markets took a quick tumble. Markets in both the U.S. and around the globe slipped by about 1 percent after the outage.
The outage also forced the U.K. government to postpone a $4.48 billion treasury auction until later in the day.
One foreign exchange trader in New York told The Wall Street Journal that his team “went ’old school’ and picked up the phone.” Others said they had disrupted their normal buying and selling patterns, which might not be back to normal pace until Monday.
Bloomberg’s terminals are vital to traders and nearly ubiquitous among financial professionals. The company has more than 300,000 subscriptions scattered across the globe.