Bloomberg terminals hit by ‘unprecedented’ global outage

Bloomberg terminals around the world suffered an “unprecedented” outage on Friday, forcing the postponement of a UK Treasury auction and affecting thousands of investors who rely on the screens. The outage started around 8:30am BST, coinciding with the close of Friday trading in China and the open across Europe. ... In Europe, its trading venue accounts for 37 per cent of all electronic trading of government bonds, and around 70 per cent of investment grade credit bonds.

Bloomberg terminals hit by ‘unprecedented’ global outage

sorry, first link may be behind a pay wall - here is another:

Global Futures Slide After Worldwide Bloomberg Outage, China Tumbles On Short Selling Boost

This comes after a series of mysterious power outages in several western countries - part of an escalating currency war?

most of the power outages and other strange activity appears to be concentrated exclusively on western targets. We hear nothing (nor are we likely to) of similar outages in, say, the Kremlin or Beijing's Forbidden CIty. It is, Zero Hedge is suggesting, a new kind of currency war, one designed to show the lack of security in western power systems, and hence, the vulnerability of its financial clearing and system.

link


EDIT:

The power outages in question where:

March 27 Netherlands
March 30 Turkey
April 1 Italy
April 7 Washington

The April 7th, 2015 power outage in Washington DC is curious to say the least. Virtually instantaneously, the government declare it was not a terrorist attack. After all, how could that possibly be when the NSA guards the country. If there was an attack on the power-grid, then the NSA would have to answer for their failure. So clearly, if it was an attack, they would never admit it.

Instead, this has been attributed to a piece of metal breaking loose from a power line 43 miles southeast of the District of Columbia, which knocked out electricity to the White House, State Department and wide area including parts of Maryland. Can a simple piece of metal break and shut down that much power of a strategic area as DC? That seems to be an excuse like some drunk driver knocked over a power pole.

Only six days before Obama had to switch to emergency power was on April 1st in Rome where the power supply was out for hours effecting the Lazio region. That included the major Roman airport of Fiumicino. The cause of that event somehow remains unknown.

Just the day before in Turkey there was another power failure. That was the worst blackout since the devastating Marmara earthquake of 1999. Chaos in the capital and much of the country drew more than 70 million Turks into chaos. Public transport was paralyzed, traffic lights were dark, conveyor belts continued. Elevators halted and mobile phones were silent. Even hospitals switched to emergency mode and the NSA style surveillance cameras in the capital Ankara went black.

There, left-wing extremists broke into the Palace of Justice and kidnapped a prosecutor during the massive power outage. The prosecutor had worked on the case of a protester who had been shot in Gezi Park. Even Prime Minister Davutoglu suspected spontaneous “sabotage”.

link

a reply to: MindBodySpiritComplex



I would dearly like to know the precise circumstances which lead to this network failing. Given the vast amounts of money being traded with the help of this system, and the importance traders place on it, one must assume that the infrastructure running the system would have to be of the highest possible quality and system stability.

If my assumption in that regard is accurate, then the only way something like this should have been able to happen at all, is by malicious action. I wonder if any zeros went missing, and if so, where they are now?

a reply to: TrueBrit

Bloomberg is trying its best to convince us there is nothing to see here and to please move on...

Bloomberg said: “Service has been fully restored. We experienced a combination of hardware and software failures in the network, which caused an excessive volume of network traffic. 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.”

Computer crash causes world's financial markets to virtually grind to a halt (The Independent)

Bloomberg is reporting that the incident was not the result of a cyberattack on its systems.

Bloomberg Terminals Go Dark Around The World (pulse headlines)


But of course they would say that - I still think there is a pattern emerging that is worth keeping an eye on...

And another take:

RUMOUR: the Bloomberg outage was caused by a spilled can of Coke (Business Insider)


It may just be coincidence but things are moving really fast now with growing AIIB support, BRICS based SWIFT alternatives, gold repatriation efforts, etc. - so some "flanking measures" for bringing down the dollar as THE reserve currency wouldn't really be all that surprising.