Outage outrage: give other vendors a chance

The April 17 Bloomberg terminal outage, which left many London traders reluctantly heading to the pub early, prompted some to question whether Bloomberg has become too big to fail. However, it also raises questions about the industry’s over-reliance on one provider

Criticism of the incident – where not only did software and hardware components of the vendor’s network fail, but its backup processes also apparently failed, causing thousands of the vendor’s Bloomberg Professional terminals to disconnect from its network – is fair enough, and Bloomberg is rightly promising to investigate the underlying causes of the failures. Bloomberg, known for its fastidious