Reuters outage raises BCP questions

LONDON – The pitfalls of relying on electronic systems was made clear to FX traders in mid-October, as a power outage at Reuters' technical centre left it without pricing in European currencies for seven hours. The outage, which began at 2.34pm in London (9.34am in New York) on Tuesday, October 12, hit real-time data from the vendor's dealing platforms, so that the data from trades on Reuters Dealing and the EBS spot FX platform did not feed through to Reuters' datafeed. To avoid the risk of displaying off-market rates, traders had to make prices for their own platforms manually, in a throwback to the pre-electronic era. Some trading on Dealing 3000 terminals in London were also affected, said a spokesperson: "Customers may have lost access to European end-of-day data and FX transactional capabilities."

Some services were back up after the close of London trading at 8.34pm, although others, such as historical news data, were left with gaps for the rest of the week. Because of the timing, traders in the US time-zones were hardest hit.

"It was a pain," said one currency trader at a US bank in New York. "It left a lot of people with no idea where the market was."

The problems were replicated in Chicago. "There has been lower volatility," reported a trader at one investment firm. "A lot of banks