The Bloomberg terminal went dark for a few hours during early trading in Europe, disrupting a UK bond sale and reminding everyone in finance how much they rely on the system.

It’s rare, but it wasn’t the first time the system that currently serves 330,000 professional traders and money managers has buckled. 

There have been a few big outages in the past quarter century. On April 17, 2015 the company blamed hardware and software failures for taking the system down for about two and a half hours. There was a similar technical outage in 2005.

The outages were more memorable in the old days.

On Aug. 9, 1995 an editor banged out the headline: “JERRY GARCIA DEAD AT 53.” 

I was in the newsroom that day when one of my colleagues posted the ALL CAPS announcement announcing that Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia had died unexpectedly,

There was an audible gasp in the New York bureau. Clients — many of whom were or had been Deadheads — reacted by clicking on the headline at the same time.

The load strained the system and caused the news feed to freeze for bit before the system failed, shutting down for about 20 minutes.

A similar thing had happened two years earlier in June of 1993 when editors posted headlines about the “incident” involving John Wayne and Lorena Bobbitt. 

There was intense interest in the story, which involved Lorena Bobbitt literally emasculating her husband. When too many people clicked on the story the platform crashed. 

The system is more robust these days. It would take a lot more than a shocking headline to bring down the platform. But evidently it still happens.