On Friday, traders across various sectors, including oil, gas, power, stocks, currencies, and bonds, faced significant operational challenges due to a global cyber outage. This disruption affected businesses from London to Singapore, according to reports from companies, banks, and trading sources.
The London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) reported that its Workspace news and data platform experienced an outage caused by a “third-party global technical issue,” impacting users worldwide. Similarly, the European Energy Exchange noted that clients using the Trayport power and gas trading platform encountered trading difficulties due to infrastructure problems with a third-party service provider.
At least six trading sources from major oil companies, including Shell and BP, as well as trading house Vitol, confirmed that their operations were affected. One trader remarked, “We are having the mother of all global market outages,” highlighting the severity of the situation. Another trader noted that while some were unable to restart their systems, those who hadn’t restarted were still functioning normally.
Disruptions were also reported in the banking sector, with German banks facing issues, as stated by a spokesperson for the Deutsche Kreditwirtschaft financial industry association. South Africa’s Capitec Bank managed to restore its card payment, ATM, and app services after experiencing significant disruptions.
Major financial institutions, including JPMorgan, HSBC, Goldman Sachs, and Barclays, did not immediately respond to inquiries regarding the outage. The impact of the cyber incident extended beyond finance, as several major U.S. airlines implemented ground stops, although it was unclear if this was related to a previous Microsoft cloud outage.
The Australian government indicated that the outage seemed to be linked to an issue at the global cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike.