Stay up to date with free updates
Just sign up Financial Services myFT Digest – delivered straight to your inbox.
Global banks, brokerages and financial technology companies including JPMorgan Chase, UBS and Bloomberg were affected by a global IT outage on Friday, leaving some traders unable to access systems to process trades.
JPMorgan’s trade execution systems were affected, and UBS and fintech firm ION Group also faced issues on Friday morning, according to people familiar with the matter. Some users of Bloomberg Terminal also experienced problems and disruptions before the U.K. market opened on Friday.
Broker CMC Markets said it was experiencing issues “currently affecting access to our trading platform.” Bloomberg said “some customers experienced disruptions using the Bloomberg Terminal and other services due to a third-party outage.” JPMorgan, UBS and ION declined to comment.
“It’s chaos,” said a senior trader at an asset manager. “It’s the biggest chaos we’ve seen in years.”
Customers said major exchanges were operating normally, but issues with banks and brokers affected traders’ ability to access their systems and confirm trades. Some brokers were forced to tell clients to send their orders to other exchanges, two of the traders said.
The disruptions came amid a global outage blamed on a software security update from CrowdStrike, which caused problems with Microsoft’s systems.
The UBS issue was related to legacy systems created by the Credit Suisse acquisition and had been resolved in Europe by early afternoon, according to people familiar with the matter.
London Stock Exchange Group said trading on its exchange was running normally but that there was an issue with its news service, in a brief news release published on Friday morning. The company said a “third-party technical issue was affecting some of our services.” The company later said its news service had been restored.
LSEG has been working closely with Microsoft on developing the product, with Microsoft acquiring a 4% stake in the company in 2022 and taking a seat on its board.
Nasdaq, Euronext, Deutsche Boerse, CBOE and Tradeweb exchanges said they were not affected by the outage.
“People can trade, [there’s] “Unless it’s extremely significant, there is limited upside potential,” the senior trader added. “Traders need to be confident that the data they’re trading on is accurate.”
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority and the Payments Systems Regulator, as well as industry body UKFinance, said they were working with financial services companies to get a better grasp on the extent of the outage.
CrowdStrike shares plunged in morning trading before the New York market opened, dropping 12%. Microsoft shares were down 1.5% in morning trading.
Friday’s outage had little impact on the broader markets, with the Stoxx Europe 600 index down 0.6% and S&P 500 futures flat.
