Traders in oil, gas, power, stocks, currencies, and bonds from London to Singapore faced difficulties operating on Friday due to a global cyber outage. Companies, banks, and trading sources reported hampered operations. LSEG Group, which operates the London Stock Exchange, stated that its Workspace news and data platform experienced an outage affecting users worldwide due to a “third-party global technical issue.”
The European Energy Exchange mentioned in an internal memo seen by Reuters that clients using the Trayport power and gas trading platform were encountering issues trading “due to infrastructure issues with a third-party service provider.” At least six trading sources at oil majors Shell and BP, as well as trading house Vitol, reported affected operations. BP, Shell, and Vitol did not immediately respond to requests for comments.
According to one trader, this incident is “the mother of all global market outages.” Another trader mentioned, “People can’t switch their computers on after restarts. Those who didn’t restart are doing fine.” A spokesperson for the Deutsche Kreditwirtschaft financial industry association stated that German banks are facing disruptions. South Africa’s Capitec Bank said card payments, ATM, and App services had been fully restored after significant disruptions.
Major banks such as JPMorgan, HSBC, Goldman Sachs, and Barclays did not immediately respond to requests for comments. Besides the financial sector, the outages had far-reaching effects, with major U.S. airlines ordering ground stops on Friday. It was not immediately clear whether the call to keep flights from taking off was related to an earlier Microsoft (MSFT.O) cloud outage. On top of these issues, Ukraine start-ups are developing artificial intelligence systems to fly fleets of drones in a race to gain a technological edge in their battle against the Russian invasion. The Australian government stated that the outage appeared to be linked to an issue at global cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike.