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 (LSEG.L), opens new tab, which runs the London Stock Exchange, said its Workspace news and data platform suffered an outage that 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 (SHEL.L), opens new tab and BP (BP.L), opens new tab 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 (CPIJ.J), opens new tab 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 (MSFT.O), opens new tab cloud outage.