JosieCox

Bloomberg’s financial terminals went down globally on Friday, resulting in disruption for traders who rely on the data machines to analyze and trade securities and causing the U.K. to postpone a scheduled multi-billion buy-back of government debt.

Traders said the terminals went dark shortly after European markets opened. By midmorning, the U.K.’s debt-management office said it had postponed a scheduled buyback of government debt, citing ongoing technical issues with a third-party platform supplier, which a spokesperson confirmed to be Bloomberg. Read: Bloomberg terminal goes down, traders get up to fun

“We are currently restoring service to those customers who were affected by today’s network issue and are investigating the cause,” a spokesman for Bloomberg, run by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, said.

Bloomberg’s data-and-information terminals are used widely by bond, stock, commodities and foreign-exchange traders globally, both to trade and to chat with other market participants logged into the terminals.

Regulators in Singapore were in touch with banks and market participants to ensure market functionality on Friday, people familiar with the matter said. The chat function is the main tool used by the global financial community and is included in the cost of a terminal–about $20,000 a year.

“The communication chat has become vital to the sharing of information across regions and counterparties. So a global outage like this is systemically important to markets all around the world,” said Louis Gargour, the chief investment officer at London-based asset manager LNG Capital.