Bloomberg, the financial data service used by traders around the world, was hit by an outage on Wednesday, briefly disrupting auctions of bonds in Europe.

The Bloomberg terminal is the crown jewel of the media empire founded by US billionaire Michael Bloomberg in 1981 and counts some 350,000 users worldwide.

The service, which costs subscribers tens of thousands of dollars a year, is ubiquitous in trading rooms, providing live pricing of company stocks, currencies, commodities, bonds and other financial instruments.

Traders and investors also use it for its news content and analytics and to exchange messages with peers around the world.