Bloomberg crash embarrassment delays £3bn debt sale

A Debt Management Office auction of short-term Treasury bills, forming part of a bid to raise £3bn, has been postponed, after Bloomberg trading terminals went TITSUP on Friday morning.

Just as the weekly tender of cheap debt was being flogged by Her Majesty's lackeys, the Bloomberg terminals crashed, affecting an estimated 300,000 traders and causing the whole affair to be postponed.

While the financial services are regularly targeted by criminals, the relative maturity of the market when it comes to information security means these attacks are rarely successful.

Bloomberg has taken to twitter to dispute concerns that the outage may have been the result of such an attack.

There is no indication at this point that this is anything other than an internal network issue.

— Bloomberg LP (@Bloomberg) April 17, 2015

However, any bids which had been tendered will not be considered valid.

Although service has now been restored, Bloomberg is still investigating what exactly went wrong.

Bloomberg's reputation for reliability has seen its terminals adopted in Hong Kong, London and New York, and its response to this event will be closely observed.

The auction was rescheduled for Friday afternoon.

In a statement, Bloomberg said: "Not all parts of our network experienced a disruption today. We have restored service to most customers and are making progress in bringing all parts of the network back online. We apologise to our customers." ®