Bloomberg outage hits financial markets

``An outage at news and market data provider Bloomberg LP hit financial markets around the world on Friday, prompting debt sales to be postponed and exacerbating a spike in volatility in European stocks... The lack of price visibility was blamed for accelerating a sell-off in European shares, while trading volumes in German government bond futures contracts fell by around a third... It was unclear what caused the outage on the system that provides real-time news and financial information to more than 320,000 subscribers globally and allows users to trade across asset classes. The impact was widely felt.... Traders said the length of time the Bloomberg screens were down was unprecedented.''