Global banks, brokerages and financial technology companies including JPMorgan Chase, UBS and Bloomberg were hit by Friday’s global IT outage, leaving some traders unable to access their systems to process trades.
JPMorgan’s trade execution systems were affected, while UBS and fintech firm ION Group also experienced issues Friday morning, according to people familiar with the matter. Some Bloomberg Terminal users also experienced issues and outages before the British market opened Friday.
Broker CMC Markets said it was currently experiencing issues “impacting access to our trading platforms.” Bloomberg said “some clients experienced interruptions when using the Bloomberg Terminal and other services, due to a third-party outage,” adding that its trading platforms continued to operate. JPMorgan, UBS and ION declined to comment.
“It’s a disaster,” said a senior trader at an asset manager. “It’s the biggest shakeup in years.”
While major marketplaces were open as normal, problems at banks and brokers affected traders’ ability to access their systems and complete trades, clients said. Some brokers were forced to ask clients to send their orders elsewhere, two traders said.
The disruptions occurred in a context global blackout The fault was attributed to a software security update from the American company CrowdStrike, which caused problems with Microsoft systems.
UBS’s problems involved legacy systems acquired in its acquisition of Credit Suisse and were resolved early this afternoon in Europe, according to people familiar with the matter.
The London Stock Exchange Group said trading was proceeding normally on its marketplace but its news service was experiencing issues, with only a few news releases issued on Friday morning. LSEG said it was experiencing “a third-party technical issue that is affecting some of our services”. The company later said the news service had been restored.
LSEG works closely on product development with Microsoft, which took a 4% stake and a seat on the company’s board in 2022.
Trading venues Nasdaq, Euronext, Deutsche Börse, CBOE and Tradeweb said they were not affected by the outage.
“People can trade, but [there’s] “The upside is limited unless it is vital,” the senior trader added. “Traders need to be confident that the data they are trading on is accurate.”
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority and Payments Systems Regulator, as well as trade body UK Finance, said they were in contact with financial services firms to better understand the extent of the outage.
CrowdStrike shares were down 9% midway through the New York trading session.
There were few signs of a broader impact from the outage on markets on Friday. The Stoxx Europe 600 index fell 0.9%, while on Wall Street, the S&P 500 was down 0.5%.