Bloomberg down: Bond sales in chaos after terminal outage | City & Business | Finance

Bloomberg’s terminal for financial professionals has suffered an outage, impacting several government bond sales and customer activity.

Traders and market sources have reported issues such as screens going blank, while live pricing and market data were not functioning on Wednesday, May 21, according to Reuters. Peter Schaffrik, chief European macro strategist at RBC and a Bloomberg terminal user, said: “You can’t load anything new, you can’t update spreadsheets, some of the auctions have been delayed.” Two market sources confirmed to Reuters that by mid-morning, their terminals were slowly regaining some functionality.

Bloomberg spokesman Ty Trippet told The Express: “Our systems are returning to normal operations and Terminal functionality has been restored following a service disruption earlier today.”

The Bloomberg Terminal is a subscription service widely used by financial service professionals, giving access to real-time financial data, news, and analytics.

Various sales were delayed on Wednesday, May 21, including the deadline for an auction of UK government debt, although that sale has now gone ahead, according to the Debt Management Office (DMO).

A bill auction in Portugal was postponed until 14:30 CEST (12:30 GMT) because of the outage, while the European Union also postponed its deadline for the sale of EU Bonds by one hour to 13:00 CEST (11:00 GMT).

Sweden delayed a scheduled bond auction due to “technical issues”, although it was not explicitly clear if this was due to the outage.

The Swedish debt office said: “Bids in the auctions are (…) submitted electronically via the Bloomberg auction system.”