LONDON: A two-hour outage at news and market data provider Bloomberg LP hit financial markets around the world on Friday, prompting debt sales to be postponed and exacerbating a spike in volatility in European stocks.

“We experienced a combination of hardware and software failures in the network, which caused an excessive volume of network traffic,” Bloomberg said in a statement. “This led to customer disconnections as a result of the machines being overwhelmed.”

Bloomberg said service has been fully restored and the company is reviewing why its “multiple redundant systems” failed to prevent the disruption.

The lack of price visibility was blamed for accelerating a sell-off in European shares, while trading volumes in German government bond futures contracts fell by around a third.

Published in Dawn, April 18th, 2015

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