The Bloomberg terminals are used by thousands of businessmen, investors and market traders to view share, commodity and metal prices, for messaging, and scan for news. The outage started exactly to coincide with the closing of Shanghai markets in China and opening of all markets across Europe. A call to the Bloomberg help desk confirmed the issue is global, with tech support saying “this is a known global issue that we acknowledge and we are working on.” Asked if hacking could be ruled out, he said “there is no information on that.” The Bloomberg’s London newsroom and television studio and the trading circles were agog with a rumor that the Bloomberg outage was caused by “someone spilling a can of coke on a server somewhere.” This was however not substantiated by any reports from Bloomberg. The Bloomberg media spokeswoman said a press release is coming shortly. Also asked about a possible hacking, she said Bloomberg was looking into it.
