Traders from London to Singapore struggle as cyber disruption disrupts business

LONDON (Reuters) – Oil, gas, energy, stocks, currency and bond traders from London to Singapore struggled to operate on Friday as a global cyber outage hampered operations, companies, banks and trading sources said.

LSEG Group, which runs the London Stock Exchange, said its Workspace news and data platform suffered an outage that affected users around the world due to a “global third-party technical issue”.

The European Energy Exchange said in an internal memo seen by Reuters that customers using the Trayport power and gas trading platform were having problems trading “due to infrastructure issues with third-party service providers”.

At least six trading sources from oil majors Shell and BP, as well as trading firm Vitol, said operations were affected. BP, Shell and Vitol did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

“We are having the mother of all disruptions in the global market,” said one trader.

“People can’t turn on their computers after rebooting them. Those who haven’t restarted are fine,” said another trader.

German banks are facing disruption, a spokesman for the financial industry association Deutsche Kreditwirtschaft said.

South Africa’s Capitec Bank said card payments, ATM services and apps have been fully restored after suffering significant disruptions.

Major banks JPMorgan, HSBC, Goldman Sachs and Barclays did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Beyond the financial sector, disruptions have spread far and wide, with major U.S. airlines ordering ground stops on Friday.

It was not immediately clear whether the order to stop flights from taking off was related to an earlier Microsoft cloud outage.

The Australian government said the outage appeared to be linked to an issue at global cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike.

(Reporting by Reuters staff; writing by Dmitry Zhdannikov; editing by Arun Koyyur)