Bloomberg terminal, the financial data service used by traders around the world, was hit by an outage on Wednesday, disrupting numerous government bond sales and customer activity, according to several European debt management offices and market sources.
The Bloomberg terminal is ubiquitous in trading rooms, providing live pricing of company stocks, currencies, commodities, bonds and other financial instruments.
Several of its functions stopped working or were slower on Wednesday.
Traders and market sources reported that live pricing and market data were not functioning and screens were blank.
"You can't load anything new, you can't update spreadsheets, some of the auctions have been delayed," Peter Schaffrik, chief European macro strategist at RBC and a Bloomberg terminal user, said.
By mid-morning in Europe, two market sources said their terminals were slowly regaining some functionality.
"This is a technical issue affecting multiple clients, our engineers are currently working on resolving this ASAP, will let you know as soon as this is fixed," Bloomberg's help desk told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Bidding in the auction of the U.K. government was delayed, according to the Debt Management Office (DMO).
"Due to the ongoing market-wide Bloomberg system issues, the bidding window for this morning's auction of the 4% 2031 is being extended," the DMO said.
A bill auction in Portugal was also delayed because of the outage, while Sweden delayed its scheduled bond auction due to "technical issues."
"Bids in the auctions are (...) submitted electronically via the Bloomberg auction system," the Swedish debt office website said.
It was not immediately clear if Wednesday's delay was down to the outage.
The European Union also postponed its deadline for Wednesday's sale of EU Bonds by one hour to 13:00 CEST (11:00 a.m. GMT).
Another Bloomberg user told Reuters that their Bloomberg terminal was not currently working, except for the chat function, while another described the situation as a "nightmare."
