LONDON/NEW YORK- Trading returned to normal after a global technology outage on Friday hampered operations at financial firms from London to Singapore and New York, although a few residual problems remained, including outages at some JPMorgan Chase automated teller machines.
A software update wreaked havoc on computer systems globally, grounding flights, forcing some broadcasters off air and hitting services from banking to healthcare.
The outage sent ripples through financial markets during Asia and early European trading hours with a number of firms involved in various aspects of the trading process affected.
Traders in oil, gas, power, stocks, currencies and bonds from London to Singapore struggled to operate on Friday.
The European Energy Exchange said in an internal memo seen by Reuters that clients using the Trayport power and gas trading platform were having problems to trade “due to infrastructure issues with third-party service provider”.
At least six trading sources at oil majors Shell and BP as well as trading house Vitol said operations were affected. BP, Shell and Vitol did not immediately respond to requests for comments.
“We are having the mother of all global market outages,” one trader said.
“People can’t switch their computers on after restarts. Those who didn’t restart are doing fine,” another trader said.
LSEG Group which runs the London Stock Exchange, said its Workspace news and data platform, regulatory news service and currency spot and forward prices had been affected by the outage caused by a “third-party global technical issue”.
By midday in London, most of those issues seemed to have been resolved. Securities trading on the London Stock Exchange was not affected.
A spokesperson for FTSE Russell, which is part of LSEG, said that they were experiencing an impact to real-time platforms, “which is preventing clients from accessing and receiving data” and affecting its indices.
The European Energy Exchange said in a statement on its website that clients using the Trayport power and gas trading platform were having problems trading “due to infrastructure issues with third-party service provider”.
At least six trading sources at oil majors Shell and BP as well as trading house Vitol said operations were affected. BP and Shell did not immediately respond to requests for comments.
Vitol said core trading operations were functioning well though some individual computers and some processes that interface with third party systems were impacted temporarily.
