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Bloomberg Terminals Suffer Widespread Failures

nytimes.com

61–69 of 69 posts

Re: Bloomberg Terminals Suffer Widespread Failures

#61

“What I miss is the instant Bloomberg chats, which I rate higher than trading or data feeds. The fact is, Bloomberg connects 100 percent of the Street, and all that human intelligence is what makes markets hum.” I enjoyed the article and I have squirrelled this quote from a trader away for future use - the need to meet and exchange information is why we used to have stock exchanges of course.

Except this information is apparently being exchanged in a closed, proprietary market.

Re: Bloomberg Terminals Suffer Widespread Failures

#62

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…

WRT 2) DOS does not require a public network; you can war dial access points or attack infrastructure to achieve the same effect.

Any insight on what happened today? I'm surprised there's no failover mechanism that tries to route traffic some other way in case of a communication failure.

Unfortunately BBG requires a bit more scrutiny because when their network goes down entire countries cannot finance themselves -- they had to postpone some debt sales in the UK today I read.

Re: Bloomberg Terminals Suffer Widespread Failures

#63

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…

> Google's been down, ditto for facebook, twitter and Azure The first three, at least, are free services and availability isn't a priority for many of their customers. Bloomberg users have different requirements. Boeing 747's are complex systems; it's not acceptable if one fails occasionally.

Google Apps is not a free service. The pricing for business is $5 or $10 per user per month. It's worth bearing in mind that when people complain about the service, they are often paying for it.

Re: Bloomberg Terminals Suffer Widespread Failures

#64
LOL. Maybe it was a can of coke???

   But reports from inside the company suggested
   that a spilled can of Coke in one of the server
   rooms had been responsible for knocking out
   systems across two continents.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3043927/Did-spilt-CO...

Re: Bloomberg Terminals Suffer Widespread Failures

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only 700mb? Maybe back in the perkin elmer days, these days they're up to 4gb, constrained only by the various linkers, file size and address spaces available...

Server-side is very big - in fact, a long time ago the part called simply "the Big" got too big and now there are multiple Bigs.

When I was there (2008, intern), they were in the process of moving server code from Bigs into separate services (BAS's, if I recall).

Re: Bloomberg Terminals Suffer Widespread Failures

#66

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…

> it makes you wonder about people who complain about down time HN in particular seems to have a "_____ is down" on the front page every few days. It's always filled with comments like this guy[1] saying how their architecture is clearly broken or how any fifteen year old could write something better. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9394071

hn was never built to be reliable, and has always had reliability issues.. it used to (still is?) run from a single server.

Re: Bloomberg Terminals Suffer Widespread Failures

#67

LOL. Maybe it was a can of coke??? But reports from inside the company suggested that a spilled can of Coke in one of the server rooms had been responsible for knocking out systems across two continents. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3043927/Did-spilt-CO...

I honestly can't believe some (semi reputable) news sites are spewing this bullshit.

Fuckin please.

Re: Bloomberg Terminals Suffer Widespread Failures

#68
post #48

Bloomberg starts at $1,750 a month At that level of cost there is an expectation of almost perfect up time and multiple redundancy - the only reason people pay that much is they believe they can get more value than that out of it..

It's rare enough that it got a news report. I'd say that qualifies as "almost perfect."

Re: Bloomberg Terminals Suffer Widespread Failures

#69
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I think to replace them someone needs to create a marketplace for different aspects of Bloomberg and you buy access to specific services and data as you need it. Would be an amazing business that, supposing you could get buy in from a load of other firms.

Really don't see an ala carte solution being worth it for most firms unless they're really trying to cut down on cost. Integrating and maintaining separate services alone is going to require additional developers. Cost associated with that coupled with quality of service and reliability (outside of this situation) of Bloomberg's current offering makes it a very tough sale. Also, guys who have been using terminals for…

I'm more thinking "if someone was to compete with Bloomberg how would they even come close to what they offer" may not be practical in reality!
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