LSEG data and services back up and running after outage

By Alun John, Karin Strohecker and Sinead Cruise

LONDON (Reuters) - LSEG Group's data and services were back up and running on Friday after suffering an outage earlier in the day that caused some disruption across financial markets. 

A global tech outage on Friday disrupted operations in multiple industries, with airlines halting flights, some broadcasters going off-air and everything from banking to healthcare hit by system problems.

LSEG, which provides financial market data and analytics to banks and other financial institutions, said a technical problem that had impacted its spot and forward rates on currencies had now been resolved and services restored. 

"We’re currently working through the backlog of data," the company told clients in a memo seen by Reuters. 

LSEG's Regulatory News Service, which publishes company updates, also resumed, while prices and news for a range of assets were available on its Workspace platform. Both had been disrupted earlier in the day. 

A spokesperson for LSEG said earlier on Friday that the firm was experiencing a third-party global technical issue that was impacting some services. Securities trading on the London Stock Exchange was not affected, the spokesperson added. 

Reuters contacted several of the world’s biggest banks to check the status of their trading activities, including JPMorgan, HSBC, Goldman Sachs and Barclays, which between them trade billions of dollars in securities daily.  

There were no confirmed reports of trading difficulties as a result of the outage, but there were some signs of disruptions at smaller financial institutions, with one London-based trader saying several multilateral trading facilities were being affected, leaving some clients unable to trade.

Some banks and financial services firms said employees and customers had problems accessing their systems. 

Barclays reported that customers were unable to manage their accounts on its digital investing platform Smart Investor, while Germany's Allianz said the outage affected the ability of employees to log on to their computers.    

LSEG first announced the issues during Asia trading hours. 

The company's shares were last trading 0.6% lower.

Reuters provides news for LSEG's Workspace platform.

A global cyber outage on Friday appeared to be triggered by an update to a product offered by global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike and affecting customers using Microsoft's Windows Operating System. Microsoft said later on Friday the issue had been fixed.

(This story has been refiled to fix a typo in paragraph 14)

(Reporting by Alun John, Karin Strohecker and Sinead Cruise in London and Rae Wee in Singapore; Writing by Amanda Cooper and Dhara Ranasinghe; Editing by Susan Fenton)