A worldwide IT outage has sent both operations and markets into chaos this morning. Whilst not confirmed, it is understood that Crowdstrike, a cyber security service designed to prevent internet breaches, could potentially have contributed to the issue via a content deployment for Microsoft which has reportedly caused blue screens of death, system shutdowns and resets across the world.
Various market operators, buy-side firms, sell-side firms and data providers are believed to have been impacted. Some buy-side firms appear to be functioning as usual, according to anonymous reports to Global Trading this morning, while others have (according to some sources) placed trading on hold. This is partially due to concerns that some displayed exchange prices may not be reliable.
Cboe Europe confirmed to Global Trading that all systems are operating normally this morning – while others have reportedly placed trading on hold. Bloomberg is believed to have experienced some connectivity issues this morning, but is now back up and running.
LSEG, which has a strategic partnership with Microsoft, saw outages on its news and data platform Workspace, which uses Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365.
In a statement, an LSEG spokesperson said: “We are currently experiencing a third party technical issue which is impacting some of our services. There is no impact to securities trading on the London Stock Exchange. We are working on resolving this issue as soon as possible and will continue to provide updates to our customers.”
Commenting on the situation, “nothing’s working,” said one trader. “Everyone’s on their mobile device. Some banks are up, Bloomberg is up, but I can’t trade as I can’t get online. Another more succinctly noted that “a Microsoft anti-virus patch has basically fucked the world”.
Problems were initially noted in APAC towards market close, before becoming apparent across Europe.
Euronext told Global Trading that “we are aware of the current Microsoft outage. It is not impacting trading across our venues, and we are closely monitoring the situation.”
Aquis, too, stated that it is “continuing to monitor the ongoing global issue affecting Microsoft services, particularly given some third party providers of trading or information services have been affected. However all Aquis trading and technology services are open and functioning as expected. We will continue to update our members should anything change.”
Notes from Liquidnet indicated that crossing in its pool was disabled, while Tradeweb confirmed that its platforms have not been affected by the outage: “Our clients are connected and have had access to our trading venues throughout”. Instinet told Global Trading that the Newport EMS had not been impacted, and that it has remained fully operational throughout the outage.
While volumes have dropped (with some traders suggesting that vols could be down by as much as -40% this morning), another noted that this should be taken with a pinch of salt, given the fact that it is also the first Friday of the summer holidays.
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