Bloomberg terminal back up after outage affects European bond sales

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By Samuel Indyk and Lucy Raitano

LONDON/GDANSK (Reuters) -News and data company Bloomberg said its systems were returning to normal on Wednesday after a brief disruption earlier in the day that delayed numerous government bond sales and affected customer activity.

“Our systems are returning to normal operations and Terminal functionality has been restored following a service disruption earlier today,” a Bloomberg spokesperson said.

The deadline for an auction of UK government debt was delayed, although that sale has now gone ahead, according to the Debt Management Office (DMO).

A bill auction in Portugal was postponed until 14:30 CEST (1230 GMT) because of the outage, while Sweden delayed its scheduled bond auction due to “technical issues”.

“Bids in the auctions are (…) submitted electronically via the Bloomberg auction system,” the Swedish debt office website said.

It was not immediately clear if Wednesday’s delay had been caused by the outage.

The European Union also postponed its deadline for Wednesday’s sale of EU Bonds by one hour to 1300 CEST (1100 GMT).

Traders and market sources had earlier reported that live pricing and market data had stopped functioning and screens went blank.

“You can’t load anything new, you can’t update spreadsheets, some of the auctions have been delayed,” Peter Schaffrik, chief European macro strategist at RBC and a Bloomberg terminal user, said.

(Reporting by Samuel Indyk, Amanda Cooper and Lucy Raitano in London; Danilo Masoni in Milan, Joao Manuel Vicente Mauricio and Jagoda Darlak in Gdansk; Editing by Dhara Ranasinghe)