Trading disrupted as outage hits banks and brokers

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Global banks, brokers and financial technology companies including JPMorgan Chase, UBS and Bloomberg were hit by the global IT outage on Friday, leaving some traders unable to access their systems in order to process trades.

JPMorgan’s trading execution systems were affected, while UBS and fintech company ION Group also faced problems on Friday morning, according to people familiar with the matter. Some Bloomberg Terminal users also faced problems and interruptions before the UK market opened on Friday.

Broker CMC Markets said it was experiencing issues “currently impacting access to our trading platforms”. Bloomberg said “some clients experienced interruptions while using the Bloomberg Terminal and other services, due to a third-party outage”. JPMorgan, UBS and ION declined to comment.

“It’s a mess,” said a senior trader at an asset manager. “This is the biggest upset in years.”

While major trading venues were open for business as normal, the issues at banks and brokers affected the ability of traders to access their systems and to finalise trades, according to clients. Some brokers were forced to direct clients to send their orders elsewhere, two traders said.

The disruptions came amid a global outage blamed on a software security update from US company CrowdStrike, which led to problems with Microsoft systems.

The London Stock Exchange Group said trading was running normally on its venue but its news service faced problems, with only a handful of news releases being published on Friday morning. LSEG said it was experiencing “a third-party technical issue which is impacting some of our services”. The company later said the news service had been restored.

LSEG works closely on building products with Microsoft, which took a 4 per cent stake and board seat at the company in 2022.

Trading venues Nasdaq, Euronext, Deutsche Börse, CBOE and Tradeweb said they were unaffected by the outage.

“People can trade but [there’s] limited upside unless it’s vital,” the senior trader added. “Traders need to be confident that the data they are trading off is accurate.”

The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority and the Payments Systems Regulator, as well as trade body UK Finance, said they were liaising with financial services companies to better understand the extent of the outage. 

CrowdStrike shares fell sharply in pre-market trading, down 12 per cent ahead of the New York open. Microsoft was down 1.5 per cent in pre-market dealing.

There was little sign of broader market fallout from the outage on Friday. The Stoxx Europe 600 was 0.6 per cent lower, while S&P 500 futures were flat.