Data Vendors Claim Quake Recovery

The main market data vendors were last week claiming to have recovered from service outages in Asia-Pacific caused by an undersea earthquake off Taiwan on the morning of Dec. 27 that severed undersea fiber-optic cables, leaving traders across the region without phone or internet access.

The quake, which measured 7.1 on the Richter scale, hit all four of the most important cables that run between Asia and the US, making it impossible to trade or transmit market data between these markets.

Connectivity providers scrambled to find back-up cables, and users of BT Radianz's network had full connectivity by Wednesday morning, according to a spokesperson. However, the spokesperson warned that the back-up cables do not provide full capacity, and was unable to say how long it would take to repair the primary lines.

According to one source in the region, consumers of Bloomberg market data were hit hard because the vendor distributes its data via a proprietary network from its data center in Princeton, New Jersey, affecting mainly small brokers in the region that tend to get their local data from Bloomberg, rather than direct from exchanges. Fund managers were less affected because they rely less on real-time data, the source says.

A Bloomberg spokesperson says that the vendor's service was restored by the afternoon of Wednesday, Dec. 27, and that those with Internet connectivity could access the data using the Bloomberg Anywhere service, though other sources say that some firms were without service until Thursday.

Reuters' market data customers in the region suffered initial disruption but were back online by press time, a spokesperson for the vendor says. Taiwan and Japan were brought back online Wednesday, and Korea was restored in time for local market open Thursday morning, the spokesperson says.

Keiren Harris, a former independent market data consultant who recently joined trading software and arcade provider Blue System, predicts that the earthquake will have a knock-on effect for market data providers. "Smaller brokers who are heavily dependent on a single source are going to start asking questions about their redundancy… and why services can be down for so long," he says.