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Bloomberg Terminals Suffer Widespread Failures

nytimes.com

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Re: Bloomberg Terminals Suffer Widespread Failures

#2

Post by bbgtoreuters »

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!

Re: Bloomberg Terminals Suffer Widespread Failures

#3

Post by anonu »

Is this the first crack in the Hoover Dam that is Bloomberg Terminals? Probably not - but the widespread reliance on the $10k+ per year terminal in the financial services industry means that this thing is ripe for disruption. The key isn't to build a terminal replacement though. fintech startups need to chip away at little bits and pieces - and need to inter-operate as much as possible. Only then will the bbg dominance be reined in.

Re: Bloomberg Terminals Suffer Widespread Failures

#4

Post by chollida1 »

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 their own.

Google's been down, ditto for facebook, twitter and Azure. If you build a big service, something will eventually fail, Bloomberg is no different, if anything they are much better than Reuters or CapIQ for availability.

I saw this quote from another comment here:

> but the widespread reliance on the $10k+ per year terminal in the financial services industry means that this thing is ripe for disruption.

I completely disagree, Bloomberg isn't some slow lethargic big company. They iterate relentlessly, their help desk is the best I've ever had the pleasure of dealing with.

If I've got a problem with the trading system, their first level help will get me to a technical specialist in that area in under 30 seconds. If they can't solve it then I'll talk to a developer in 30 minutes.

Bloomberg is the leader in teh financial space, not only because their tech is the best in teh business, but because they listen to their customer better than their competitors, they release more frequently, and when they want to enter an area( say risk management) they go out and buy someone who is already a leader in that field.

In short they never stop running, if anything they are increasing the distance between them and their "peers".

As one example, they just posted a message to every Bloomberg terminal user telling us that the issue was an internal networking issue that has been solved.

EDIT to answer this question:

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

2 things:

1) This question really doesn't make sense. How do you DDOS a one way line? They send you quotes for the tickers that you request. You can't really DDOS them, unless you do something like request tickers over and over again in a tight loop, in which case their api will rate limit you.

2) its a closed system. Only terminal users can access it and only through the bloomberg terminal or their api, so they control all the access points.

Re: Bloomberg Terminals Suffer Widespread Failures

#7

Post by brador »

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?

Re: Bloomberg Terminals Suffer Widespread Failures

#9

Post by anmilo »

anonu wrote: post #3

Is this the first crack in the Hoover Dam that is Bloomberg Terminals? Probably not - but the widespread reliance on the $10k+ per year terminal in the financial services industry means that this thing is ripe for disruption. The key isn't to build a terminal replacement though. fintech startups need to chip away at little bits and pieces - and need to inter-operate as much as possible. Only then will the bbg dominan…

one of the reasons i'm generally Ok with Slack's valuation is that there is a ton of room for a messaging service to offer a service that is secure and auditable at the level that the SEC/FINRA and Banks require. Like the article mentions, if you talk to the people using BBG, it's really the chat functionality that provides the main value for literally everyone, at least in my experience (former front office dev)
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