Rumors circulating around Bloomberg’s own newsroom apparently point to a very low-tech cause for the two and a half hour outage experienced by the Bloomberg worldwide terminal network early Friday.
As reported by online financial news source Business Insider, a rumor circulating around Bloomberg’s own London newsroom and TV studio is that the outage was caused by ‘someone spilling a can of coke on a server somewhere.’ That countered earlier rumors of some sort of cyberattack against Bloomberg.
Bloomberg’s terminals have been a mainstay for decades in the trading rooms of leading brokers, banks, and money managers worldwide.
Bloomberg does about $8 billion a year in Revenues, the majority of which come from terminal subscription fees, which come in at a rate of about $1,800 per user per month.
The outage did more than give traders a couple of hours to twiddle their thumbs and update their Facebook pages. A number of planned corporate bond offerings were postponed, and the The UK government (via the Debt Management office) had to postpone a scheduled large buy-back of government debt.
No official reason has yet been given for the outage.