The owner of the London Stock Exchange has launched an investigation after a blackout at Refinitiv, its recently-acquired data business, left traders without access to market prices for several hours yesterday.
London Stock Exchange Group said it was looking into the outage that affected Refinitiv’s Eikon software, which provides real-time stock, bond, commodity and currency prices. About 400,000 bankers, traders and investors are understood to use the service.
The crash occurred at 7am, shortly before the market opened in London, and services stayed down until after 9am. Some users in Europe and Asia were unable to log in until the early afternoon, although Refinitiv said that services were “fully restored” by 1pm.
City traders, most of whom use far more expensive Bloomberg terminals, said it did not look as though the problems had affected trading volumes.
“We are aware of an issue which disrupted our service to some customers,” a spokesman for the exchange said. “The service has been fully restored. We are investigating the cause and closely monitoring our service. We apologise for the disruption.”
Advertisement
Initial findings suggested that “an issue with the authentication servers” caused the problems, Refinitiv said in an email to customers. The malfunction will be a source of embarrassment for LSEG, which spent $27 billion (£20 billion) buying Refinitiv from Thomson Reuters and a consortium led by Blackstone, the asset manager. The “transformational” deal completed in January, about 18 months after it was announced.
The expectation was that the tie-up would help it to compete with rivals in the financial data market, including Bloomberg, CME Group and S&P Global. However, LSEG shares have lost a fifth of their value this year as investors balked at the huge integration costs. At the beginning of March, bosses said that it would cost £1 billion over the first 12 months to bed in.
Yesterday’s malfunction had little effect on the company’s valuation, with the share price nudging 112p, or 1.5 per cent, up to £73.90, giving LSEG a market capitalisation of £40 billion.
