Traders from London to Singapore struggle as cyber outage disrupts business


FILE PHOTO: The headquarters of the European Energy Exchange is pictured during evening light in a centre-of-town high-rise office building in Leipzig, Germany April 25, 2021. REUTERS/Annegret Hilse/File Photo

LONDON (Reuters) - Traders in oil, gas, power, stocks, currencies and bonds from London to Singapore struggled to operate on Friday as a global cyber outage hampered operations, companies, banks and trading sources said.

LSEG Group, which runs the London Stock Exchange, said its Workspace news and data platform suffered an outagethat affected users worldwide due to a "third-party global technical issue".

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.

German banks are facing disruptions, a spokesperson for the Deutsche Kreditwirtschaft financial industry association said.

South Africa's Capitec Bank said card payments, ATM and App services had been fully restored after experiencing significant disruptions.

Major banks JPMorgan, HSBC, Goldman Sachs and Barclays did not immediately respond to requests for comments.

Besides the financial sector, the outages rippled far and wide, with major U.S. airlines ordering ground stops on Friday.

It was not immediately clear whether the call to keep flights from taking off were related to an earlier Microsoft cloud outage.

The Australian government said the outage appeared to be linked to an issue at global cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike.

(Reporting by Reuters staff; Writing by Dmitry Zhdannikov; Editing by Arun Koyyur)

Follow us on our official WhatsApp channel for breaking news alerts and key updates!

Next In Tech News

Google adds mental health tools to Gemini chatbot after lawsuit
Germany intelligence agency warns of Russian APT28 cyber spying
PIMCO weighs $14 billion debt deal for Oracle's Michigan data center, Bloomberg News reports
Anthropic touts AI cybersecurity project with Big Tech partners
Intel joins Musk's Terafab AI chip project to power humanoid, data center goals
Uber bets on Amazon's custom chips to boost AI efforts
Fox to integrate Kalshi prediction market data across news platforms
Depressed tech valuations could offer entry point for investors, Goldman Sachs says
Like analysing a crime scene: Experts explain how to expose deepfakes
AI could change the world. But first it is changing Silicon Valley.

Others Also Read