BrokerTec outage serves as ‘systemic risk’ wake-up call

January 11 shutdown of dominant US Treasury market platform worries participants

An outage on BrokerTec that shut down trading of US Treasuries for nearly an hour and a half earlier this month has renewed concerns that the platform represents a single point of failure in arguably the world’s most important bond market.

“It woke everybody up, showing that there is systemic risk. We were very fortunate that it was a Friday afternoon and not too much was going on, but it could have been at a much worse time,” said Dawn Newsome, chief technology officer for rates trading at