Bloomberg terminals restored after global outage
Bloomberg's trading terminal experienced a prolonged outage on Friday morning, resulting in a treasury auction in the U.K. being postponed.
Service was fully restored as of 4 p.m. London time.
"We experienced a combination of hardware and software failures in the network, which caused an excessive volume of network traffic," the company told CNBC in a statement. "This led to customer disconnections as a result of the machines being overwhelmed. We discovered the root cause quickly, isolated the faulty hardware, and restarted the software. We are reviewing our multiple redundant systems, which failed to prevent this disruption."
The company confirmed to CNBC that its terminal was unavailable worldwide, with traders from the U.K. and Singapore complaining on Twitter that they had been affected by the issue. The interruption began around 8.20 a.m. London time.
The U.K. Debt Management Office confirmed to CNBC that a treasury auction due at 10 a.m. London time on Friday morning had been postponed due to the problems with the Bloomberg terminal.
A trader at Amplify Trading in London said that the issue had also hit trading liquidity on Friday and accentuated the "risk-off" sentiment seen in several asset markets during the morning session. The Bank of England later said in a statement that it was ready to provide liquidity if needed after the outage, according to Reuters.
Bloomberg terminals—also known as Bloomberg Professional—are vital to many traders' day. As well monitoring and analyzing real-time financial data, traders can also execute trades using the terminal. Bloomberg has previously stated that it has more than 315,000 subscribers worldwide.
Read More System isn't 'rigged'—Bloomberg defends HFT
Michael Hewson, chief markets analysts at CMC Markets, told CNBC the issue "could well" affect trading volumes.
"I'm finding it frustrating...but in terms of market information, there's a lack of visibility," he said.
Marc Ostward, strategist at ADM Investor Services, agreed that liquidity could be hit, "no doubt about it." But he stressed that most traders would have access to other trading resources, such as electronic trading system Tradeweb and Reuters.
A Singapore-based trader at a major European bank told CNBC that his team were reverting to a Reuters dealing platform for prices and transactions.
Read MoreBloomberg terminal now following bitcoin prices
Disclosure: Bloomberg is a competitor of CNBC in reporting and distributing business news on the web and on television.