On October 8, a fixed-income trader at a large US hedge fund noticed something odd -- Instant Bloomberg's chat function had gone down. While outages are a normal, and to an extent, expected part of life for any sustained online service, Bloomberg outages are particularly rare, especially given the high number of users active on the platform each day.

Bloomberg estimated in 2022 that there were 350,000 Bloomberg Terminal subscribers worldwide, and in 2023 the Financial Times reported that users sent