Bloomberg glitch hits India, global markets; volumes dip

Trading activities in financial markets in India and many other countries took a hit today after a major technical glitch blacked out the widely- used Bloomberg trading terminals for up to four hours.
In the UK, the Treasury had to cancel a bond auction that was scheduled to take place on a Bloomberg platform while traders and fund managers in India also said the volumes went down due to the outage.
There were also reports about hacking attempt at Bloomberg's website, while messaging services of another major financial data and trading terminal provider too went down for a brief period.

The outages, which extended for at least two hours in India, slowed activities in the Indian market and affected overall trading volumes, according to traders.
Trading volume declined today at the NSE and the BSE. At the NSE, equity volume dropped to 70.69 crore from 84.63 crore on Thursday. However, the decline at the BSE was less, with equity volume dipping to 29.37 crore from 30.51 crore yesterday.
A lot of daily market activities would have also been affected, traders said.

Market participants who use these terminals said the outages were there for 2-4 hours in different parts of the world.

"Significant but not all parts of our system experienced a disruption today. There is no indication at this point that this is anything other than an internal network issue," a Bloomberg spokesperson told PTI.
"We have restored service to most customers and are making progress in bringing all parts of the system back online. We apologise to our customers," the spokesperson said.
In a tweet, Bloomberg said the problems are being investigated.
The Bloomberg trading screens are widely used by market players and financial professionals, among others.
According to experts, fund managers and traders who track more than one market were hit substantially, especially since a lot of "algo activities" are routed through these terminals.

Going by reports, Bloomberg's trading terminals are used by more than three lakh financial professionals globally.
On the other hand, experts said smart investors must have taken advantage of the glitch and would have gone short on the market as the mood was not upbeat.