A widespread outage affecting Bloomberg LP’s terminal services on Wednesday disrupted market activity across Europe, leading to delayed government bond auctions in both the United Kingdom and the European Union.
The UK’s Debt Management Office (DMO), which oversees bond sales for the Treasury, announced it was extending the bidding window for its latest auction by 90 minutes, pushing the close from the typical 10:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. London time. The European Union also extended its debt sale deadline by one hour, rescheduling it to 1:00 p.m. Brussels time. Both cited “technical problems” with Bloomberg’s systems as the cause.
“These delays reflect ongoing market-wide Bloomberg system issues,” the UK DMO said in a statement.
The EU described the outage as stemming from “global technical problems with Bloomberg.”
Bloomberg terminals are a cornerstone of global financial markets, providing real-time data, messaging, and trading tools used by professional investors and institutions worldwide. The sudden loss of access to these services had a ripple effect across trading desks, particularly during the sensitive morning window when European bond auctions and trading volumes typically peak.
Users quickly reported issues on social media platforms, including X (formerly Twitter), where traders shared images of blank terminal screens and questioned the robustness of Bloomberg’s system security. The service-monitoring site Downdetector also registered a spike in complaints linked to Bloomberg services.
“Seems like 90% of Bloomberg terminals around the world are spazzing out and gone blank. Mine included,” wrote one user under the handle @EffMktHype.
Another trader remarked on the eerie market quiet, noting the outage had left little activity in its wake.
On Bloomberg Television, the company acknowledged it was experiencing technical difficulties and said it was working to resolve them. As of publication, Bloomberg had not provided additional public comment, and a message sent to the company’s press office was not immediately returned.
While the cause of the outage remains unclear, the incident has raised fresh concerns about infrastructure resilience in modern financial markets. It follows a string of past disruptions affecting key European financial systems. In recent years, the UK’s Crest settlement system and the European Central Bank’s securities network have both experienced technical issues that forced institutions to postpone or alter operations.
Market reactions to Wednesday’s glitch were measured but noticeable. US stock futures traded lower in early activity, with the E-mini S&P 500 futures contract down around 0.6% amid lower-than-average volume.
Despite the disruption, analysts suggested that markets were more inconvenienced than destabilized. The short delay in auction windows signals confidence among authorities that the issue would be temporary.
With input from the Wall Street Journal, Market Watch, Bloomberg.
