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Breaking: Bloomberg Terminals reported to be down globally

Journalist: David Belle, Newspage

ended 22. May 2025

Looking for comments on the potential impact here. Not much info yet.

Could it be a cyber attack?

3 responses from the Newspage community

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Editor
Tony Redondo
Founder at Cosmos Currency Exchange
Bloomberg Terminals, the lifeblood of global finance, crashed worldwide this morning, leading to chaos in the markets with traders unable to access live pricing, stalling trades, and slashing volumes, including a UK Debt Management Office sale. The DMO later confirmed the auction of 4 per cent treasury gilts was successfully concluded after a delay of around 90 minutes. Bloomberg cited an internal issue, but speculation of a cyberattack persists. The Treasury owns several Bloomberg terminals, as does the Bank of England. The system was last hit by a major outage in 2015. This outage exposes the financial system’s dangerous reliance on a single platform. Alternatives like LSEG exist, yet Bloomberg’s grip persists. This isn’t just a glitch; it’s a systemic warning.
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Kundan Bhaduri
Entrepreneur, Investor and Landlord at The Kushman Group
These £24k a pop Bloomberg terminals aren't really luxuries but the central nervous system through which $10 trillion flows daily. With terminals down, bond markets lose price discovery, forex desks operate blind, and derivatives traders can't access models preventing billion-pound blunders. Though cyber attacks look sexy on headlines, the 2015 outage proved that mundane technical failures could also be the cause. What's truly alarming is our financial system's dangerous dependence on a single private company's infrastructure with 325,000 traders globally paralysed simultaneously. I hope the Bank of England's contingency protocols would have activated immediately, as they should in such scenarios, but settlement risk is compounding by the minute.
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David Belle
Founder and Trader at Fink Money
There have been some reports on social media that Bloomberg terminals are down or are being extremely slow.

If this is a cyber attack, that's hugely detrimental to the whole financial ecosystem since so much OTC business is conducted via Bloomberg chats.

Pretty much everyone in finance uses them!