Refinitiv’s trading services hit by 5-hour outage

Refinitiv, the data and trading provider owned by London Stock Exchange Group, suffered a five-hour outage on Thursday that knocked out some of its most widely used services.

The group said the problem affected its Eikon terminals, which sit on traders’ desks, the FXall currency trading platform and World-Check One, which checks if potential customers could breach rules against money laundering, bribery and corruption.

The downtime affected some but not all of its 400,000 users worldwide. Problems with Refinitiv’s services began at about 8.30am London time, according to users, and were resolved around 1.30pm.

The extensive outage comes only weeks after LSE said it would have to spend more than analysts were expecting to integrate its $27bn purchase of Refinitiv and resolve longstanding technology challenges.

LSE shares suffered their worst one-day fall in more than 20 years after the group made the announcement, as investors fretted about the deal’s cost. The shares ticked up by about 1 per cent on Thursday.

Refinitiv told customers that its investigations indicated the outage had been triggered by a problem with its authentication servers, which verifies users who are trying to log in.