“Nothing’s working,” said one trader. “Everyone’s on their mobile device. Some banks are up, Bloomberg is up, but I can’t trade as I can’t get online.
Another noted “A Microsoft anti-virus patch has basically fucked the world.”
The Microsoft cyber security service called Crowdstrike is impacting systems globally including various market operators, buy-side firms, sell-side firms and data providers. Warnings first came from Asia Pacific as it moved towards market close.
One trader noted, “It was quiet yesterday, it is not month end so market open for London fixed income has not been badly affected.”
While some businesses such as Bloomberg, MarketAxess and Tradeweb were reportedly still operating, others were on hold or closed. Notes from Liquidnet noted that crossing in its pool was disabled. Euronext was reporting prices for North American stocks were not accurate.
While LSEG, which has a major partnership with Microsoft, reportedly saw its joint-project Workstation stop functioning, an LSEG spokesperson said, “We are currently experiencing a third party technical issue which is impacting some of our services. There is no impact to securities trading on the London Stock Exchange. We are working on resolving this issue as soon as possible and will continue to provide updates to our customers.”
A spokesperson at Tradeweb, an LSEG subsidiary, said “Tradeweb platforms have not been affected by the Microsoft/CrowdStrike IT outage. Our clients are connected and have had access to our trading venues throughout.”
CBOE Europe reported all of its systems were operating normally.
Some traders reported they were holding on trading in certain markets as uncertainty around pricing and liquidity created risk.
Paul Battersby, assurance lead, chief technology office at HSBC, wrote an explanation of the situation as he personally understood it on Linkedin.
“In brief, CrowdStrike (the company providing Endpoint Detection and Response tooling) has pushed an update that doesn’t play nicely with Windows (Linux has, so far as I can see, not been affected) causing them to go into a “boot loop” (I.e they start but never reach a state where they can be used), ultimately resulting in the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD, an error screen specific to Windows denoting a fatal state),” he wrote.
“To prevent this occurring is down to testing controls, i.e. making sure that changes are placed in environments and circumstances that mimic (as much as possible) real world scenarios (or, better, worst case real world scenarios) to identify issues. That so many machines are affected does throw a spotlight on CrowdStrike’s testing process with Windows machines in general. But also shows that companies impacted by this also didn’t test this patch before rolling it out across their fleet,” he continued.
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