Too ’Berg to fail? What October’s Instant Bloomberg outage means for the industry

The ubiquitous communications platform is vital for traders around the globe, especially in fixed income and exotic derivatives. When it fails, the disruption can be great.

Credit: Risk.net montage/Getty

On October 8, a fixed-income trader at a large US hedge fund noticed something odd—Instant Bloomberg’s chat function had gone down. While outages are a normal, and to an extent, expected part of life for any sustained online service, Bloomberg outages are particularly rare, especially given the high number of users active on the platform each day.

Bloomberg estimated in 2022 that there were 350,000 Bloomberg Terminal subscribers worldwide, and in 2023 the Financial Times reported that users sent

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