Bloomberg Terminals Suffer Widespread Failures

Post by chinathrow » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 1:38 PM UTC

brador wrote: post #7

chollida1 wrote: post #4

The outage isn't that bad. I've talked to 5 other firms in Canada this morning and haven't heard of a single one that is down. Bloomberg's tickering plant is still working and their emsx(trading system) is up and running, albeit a bit slow right now. I think it was on a stackoverflow podcast that Joel or Jeff said that it makes you wonder about people who complain about down time if they've ever built something of th…

How do they protect the ticker tape thing from attacks, like say, a DDOS?

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 1:43 PM UTC

chinathrow wrote: post #11

brador wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do they protect the ticker tape thing from attacks, like say, a DDOS?

If the data is mission critical to your company, you consume the feed via private leased lines or interconnects.

Post by ztnewman » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 1:49 PM UTC

chollida1 wrote: post #4

The outage isn't that bad. I've talked to 5 other firms in Canada this morning and haven't heard of a single one that is down. Bloomberg's tickering plant is still working and their emsx(trading system) is up and running, albeit a bit slow right now. I think it was on a stackoverflow podcast that Joel or Jeff said that it makes you wonder about people who complain about down time if they've ever built something of th…

Post by andy_ppp » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 1:53 PM UTC

bachback wrote: post #12

bbgtoreuters wrote: post #2

Decades of crusty code - C++ wrapped around C wrapped around Fortran, home brewed versions of the STL, nih syndrome across the tooling. Actually surprised outages not more common. Still, given their interview process is basically parlour trick questions about pointers and char arrays, it is quite telling!

Bloomberg started out as a network system independent of the Internet. Michael Bloomberg was a network engineer. I'm not sure they ever really switched to proper TCP/IP. This company sure looks like a dinosaur these days. However its hard to imagine a company being able to replace even a chunk of their infrastructure. They are tightly integrated into all institutions and there is no other service which offers a compl…

Post by osullivj » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 2:21 PM UTC

lmorris84 wrote: post #16

chollida1 wrote: post #4

The outage isn't that bad. I've talked to 5 other firms in Canada this morning and haven't heard of a single one that is down. Bloomberg's tickering plant is still working and their emsx(trading system) is up and running, albeit a bit slow right now. I think it was on a stackoverflow podcast that Joel or Jeff said that it makes you wonder about people who complain about down time if they've ever built something of th…

Presumably many institutions would have other sources of pricing data too - I know this is the case in many sell-sides, not sure about everywhere else. I've worked in a few sell-sides and you see bloomberg screens all over the place, but usually alongside front office trading systems like Fidessa which are powered by direct feeds a lot of the time. Probably a much bigger issue for everyone who doesn't have exchange c…