Financial firms in Europe were left without key data on
market prices for about 10 hours last week owing to a power failure
in one of Reuter’s datacentres.
The Reuters data feed, which is used by firms to automatically
update their own prices, crashed at about 2.30pm London time and
was restored at midnight on Tuesday 13 October.
The electronic news and information provider said a power outage
at its Docklands Technical Centre caused disruption to services,
specifically its IDN-based information services in Europe.
"Customers globally may have lost access to European end-of-day
data and foreign exchange transactional capabilities. Reuters is
working with customers to recover any outstanding services
currently not available," the company said.
A spokesman for Reuters would not comment on its disaster
recovery arrangements.
Daniel Mayo, lead analyst in the financial services practice at
analyst firm Datamonitor, said he was surprised that Reuters did
not have the necessary back-up procedures to stop a power outage
from causing severe disruption to one of its main its services.
"Ideally, if one datacentre goes down, everything should be
shifted to another site in another location," he said. "This should
take about 10 minutes rather than 10 hours."
He predicted that future corporate governance regulations will
require financial firms to check that suppliers of key information
services have adequate back-up procedures.
In 2002 Reuters suffered an embarrassing IT failure, when about
half of its information terminals - which supply vital financial
data to stock markets around the world - went down.