Global Cyber Outage Halts Trading Operations Worldwide

A global cyber outage disrupted traders in various sectors from London to Singapore on Friday. The London Stock Exchange's news and data platform was impacted, along with trading platforms at major companies like Shell, BP, and Vitol. Banks and airlines also faced significant disruptions.

Traders in oil, gas, power, stocks, currencies, and bonds from London to Singapore struggled to operate on Friday as a global cyber outage hampered operations, companies, banks, and trading sources said. LSEG Group, which runs the London Stock Exchange, said its Workspace news and data platform suffered an outage that affected users worldwide due to a "third-party global technical issue".

The European Energy Exchange said in an internal memo seen by Reuters that clients using the Trayport power and gas trading platform were having problems trading "due to infrastructure issues with third-party service provider". At least six trading sources at oil majors Shell and BP as well as trading house Vitol said operations were affected. BP, Shell, and Vitol did not immediately respond to requests for comments.

"We are having the mother of all global market outages," one trader said. "People can't switch their computers on after restarts. Those who didn't restart are doing fine," another trader said.

German banks are facing disruptions, a spokesperson for the Deutsche Kreditwirtschaft financial industry association said. South Africa's Capitec Bank said card payments, ATM, and App services had been fully restored after experiencing significant disruptions.

Major banks JPMorgan, HSBC, Goldman Sachs, and Barclays did not immediately respond to requests for comments. Besides the financial sector, the outages rippled far and wide, 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 cloud outage. The Australian government said the outage appeared to be linked to an issue at global cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike.