File under: A good reason to keep some cash and gold under the bed.
It is not exactly the same as the ATM system going down, but it is still a very good object lesson on why you should keep some of your wealth in a form that can be accessed offline:
Bloomberg terminals around the world suffered an “unprecedented” outage on Friday, forcing the postponement of a UK Treasury auction.
The outage started around 3:30am ET, coinciding with the close of Friday trading in China and the open across Europe. By 7:45am most terminals were back up and running.
The Bloomberg Professional service — the terminal has more than 315,000 subscribers worldwide — includes most, if not all, of the major traders in the world.
The period offline caused the UK Debt Management Office to postpone planned tenders for UK Treasury Bills “due to ongoing technical issues with the third party platform supplier”, and any bids submitted were deemed null and void. The auction was instead scheduled for early Friday afternoon.
Bloomberg said that the global outage was “unprecedented” in scale. “We’re urgently looking into it,” the company said. “It’s being treated very seriously at the highest level.”
“There is no indication at this point that this is anything other than an internal network issue,” the company said.
The company reportedly charges as much as $24,000 a year for a single terminal subscription.
-RW
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