London/Moscow: WhatsApp’s nearly
six-hour long outage on Monday hit trading of assets from
cryptocurrencies to Russian oil, market players said, although a
quick shift to alternative platforms such as Telegram limited severe
disruption.
Despite many financial institutions
discouraging employees from using messaging services such as WhatsApp
and other Facebook platforms that went down on Monday, their
convenience has made them popular among traders communicating with
clients in over-the-counter (OTC) markets.
Facebook Inc blamed a “faulty
configuration change” for the outage that hit WhatsApp, as well
as Instagram and Messenger, in the largest ever outage tracked by web
monitoring group Downdetector.
Among those affected was BCB Group, a
London-based crypto firm that offers OTC trading as well as other
services. Facebook’s services went dark at around noon Eastern time
(1600 GMT), a key window for BCB’s traders.
“The WhatsApp outage hit us in our
busiest trading period where we face U.S. counterparties,” said
Chief Executive Oliver von-Landsberg Sadie.
“Day-on-day volume was down 15% on
the average daily, which we’re internally attributing to the
connectivity issues. Telegram and Slack-based trading was on par with
daily averages.”
WhatsApp usage among financial traders
tracked by communications surveillance firm VoxSmart has boomed as
banks accept that clients want to use the platform, even if bosses
prefer their staff to use official messaging channels, VoxSmart CEO
Oliver Blower said.
The app has become the “default
messaging service” in many markets, especially in continental
Europe and Asia-Pacific, Blower added.
From some 2,000 interdealer users
sending 10,000 messages a day in the energy market in 2016, VoxSmart
today tracks between three and five million messages weekly across
asset classes, including between banks and buy-side clients.
“What’s interesting is both the
volume and the content of the messages. It’s not just, what time are
you headed to ‘The Dog and Duck’, it’s, what’s your price on a
5-year?,” said Blower, using slang for a British pub.
Whatsapp to Telegram
Still, the
prevalence of messenger services beyond WhatsApp meant Monday’s
outage was a nuisance rather than a major disruption.
In India, for example, market chatter
on WhatsApp has moved to Telegram where there are fewer restrictions
on the size of group chats. The outage also came after markets had
closed in much of Asia, limiting any impact.
In the Middle East, “crypto OTC
trading is predominately on Telegram or WhatsApp, where you ask your
OTC brokers for bid and offer, and then you hit it and they’ll
confirm the transaction,” said Zachary Cefaratti, CEO of Dubai
investment platform Dalma Capital, adding that Telegram was becoming
more widely used.
OTC traders in oil markets were also
hit, though again the blow was softened by the use of other
platforms.
In Russia, oil traders said WhatsApp
was commonly used to communicate details on orders across Europe and
Asia. Monday’s outage was an “unpleasant surprise”, one
Europe-based trader said.
“It was not nice. Everybody uses
it. But we use alternative messengers too, so switched,” said
another.
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