Bloomberg terminal outage disrupts bond sales across Europe

Published Wed, May 21, 2025 · 05:57 PM — Updated Wed, May 21, 2025 · 06:30 PM

News and data company Bloomberg suffered an outage to its terminal for financial professionals on Wednesday (May 21), disrupting numerous government bond sales and customer activity, according to several European debt management offices and market sources.

Traders and market sources reported that live pricing and market data was not functioning and screens were blank.

“You can’t load anything new, you can’t update spreadsheets, some of the auctions have been delayed,” Peter Schaffrik, chief European macro strategist at RBC and a Bloomberg terminal user, said.

By mid-morning in Europe, two market sources said their terminals were slowly regaining some functionality.

Bloomberg did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Bidding in an auction of UK government was delayed, according to the Debt Management Office (DMO).

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“Due to the ongoing market-wide Bloomberg system issues, the bidding window for this morning’s auction of the 4 per cent 2031 is being extended,” the DMO said.

A bill auction in Portugal was also delayed because of the outage, while Sweden delayed its scheduled bond auction due to “technical issues”.

“Bids in the auctions are (...) submitted electronically via the Bloomberg auction system,” the Swedish debt office website said.

It was not immediately clear if Wednesday’s delay was down to the outage.

The European Union also postponed its deadline for Wednesday’s sale of EU Bonds by one hour to 1300 CEST (1100 GMT).

Another Bloomberg user told Reuters that their Bloomberg terminal was not currently working, except for the chat function, while another described the situation as a “nightmare.” REUTERS

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