UPDATE: Global IT issues impact energy trading; Trayport services return

LONDON (ICIS)–IT issues that impacted energy trading systems on Friday morning were gradually being resolved, with market participants regaining access to critical applications.

A flawed update of cybersecurity software CrowdStrike hit Windows operating systems, with IT outages affecting companies across many sectors.

This included energy trading platform Trayport and several brokers, with trading operations impacted.

Trayport said shortly after midday London time it had made “significant progress in implementing workarounds for the ongoing CrowdStrike-related outage”.

It said its services were being restored, including risk-based trading, and that the group was working to bring the remaining services back online as quickly as possible.

A German power trader told ICIS shortly after midday London time that “all was back to normal” and was able to access broker screens.

“It has been very bad this morning. Now everything is working smoothly, but all connections were down for a while,” a gas trader added.

A broker had told ICIS earlier in the morning that “hardly anything is working here, we are just waiting for systems to come back.”

LIQUIDITY

Most traders contacted by ICIS reported issues affecting their usual trading activities as well as data used for analyzing market fundamentals.

Some European gas and power traders said broker screens were not available and the issue was likely to affect liquidity throughout Friday’s trading session.

Another added that they expected the number of transactions to go through at the end of the day to be down by about half.

“I can chat and agree on deals, but I cannot put it in my system, meaning the P&L is not updated,” said one EU gas trader in the morning.

“There’s a lot of counterparties offline, and those that are online are reluctant to show prices this morning,” said an LNG trader.

Others reported fewer issues and said they could operate as usual.

Intraday price movements highlighted that the global IT disruptions impacting energy trading activities on Friday did not have any significant impact on European gas and power prices, as highlighted by regional market commentaries published by ICIS.

ENERGY EXCHANGES

Commenting on the status of ICE’s derivatives markets, an ICE spokesperson told ICIS: “We are aware of the issue and markets are fully operational. We are in close dialogue with our customers on whether and how they’re impacted”.

Earlier in the session, the European Energy Exchange (EEX) reported in a message to trading participants that customers using Trayport services were potentially facing technical problems.

“Customers may observe problems to login or to trade via Trayport due to infrastructure issues with a third-party service provider,” EEX said.

EEX also offered its assistance to customers for removing orders or trading on behalf.

European power exchange EPEX SPOT, which is part of EEX, told ICIS that issues with the Spanish OMIE short-term trading platform, which caused a partial decoupling of markets on Friday morning, were not related to the global IT issues. It confirmed that all other European day-ahead power auctions were running to plan and order book closures were happening on time.

Trading across the Nord Pool exchange was not impacted, a spokesman confirmed, and added that it was monitoring the situation closely.

Spanish gas exchange MIBGAS also told ICIS it has not been affected by the outage.

The electronic capacity trading platform RBP, owned by the Hungarian gas transmission system operator FGSZ Natural Gas Transmission, said it had not been impacted.

IMPACT ON ENERGY COMPANIES

Several energy companies contacted by ICIS did not report issues related to the global IT incident and were monitoring the situation.

Spanish gas system operator Enagas told ICIS it “is not vulnerable because it does not have the impacted software installed, but an analysis is being carried out to foresee any eventual impact”.

“As far as we’re aware, everything has been fine here relating to the outages and we are not aware of any issues in the LNG shipping market making an impact,” a UK-based shipbroker told ICIS.

Other LNG shipping sources have also so far said they have noted no impact on terminals or shipping operations.

Belgian gas system operator and LNG terminals operator Fluxys told ICIS “there have been some very minor issues without any real effect on flows”. The issues related to the “impact on the systems of our [external] partners.”, Fluxys’ subsidiaries include Dunkerque LNG and Zeebrugge LNG.

ICIS contacted other major European LNG operators and global energy companies but received no replies by the time of publishing.