“Bloomberg’s global outage on Friday highlights yet another banking sector weakness. The financial data network’s downtime may have been a problem only for the richest fraction of the top 1 percent. But it prompted enough worry for the Bank of England to remind banks that it’s there as a lender of last resort, raising questions about traders’ heavy reliance on a few fallible systems.
There’s a frivolous side to the woes of Bloomberg LP, the private company whose terminals not only provide financial information and analytics to many in the financial sector but also function as the trading world’s most entrenched social network. The Wall Street Journal noted that bankers suddenly had to use telephones in the absence of Bloomberg’s messaging system, making trading floors noisier than usual. And Twitter revealed that denizens of the City of London, in the time zone most affected, were flocking to the enclave’s pubs.”
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