Following the death of Jerry Garcia August 9, 1995, Bloomberg terminals all over Wall Street froze, causing near panic among investors.
A ‘Bloomberg terminal’ is a combination of software and hardware professionals in finance and other related industries use to monitor and analyze real-time financial data and place trades.
On this day, exactly 21 years ago, Jerry Garcia was found dead of a heart attack. Investors using the terminal received an update about the troubling news for deadheads, reports Business Insider, titled simply ‘JERRY GARCIA DEAD AT 53’ in all caps. The financial terminal began distributing non-financial news for a short time, but the sheer amount of people clicking the link news of Garcia’s death brought the terminal to a halt.
Reddit user lpcook was reportedly an equity analyst on Wall Street at this time. He told fellow Reddit users that he saw “the headline scroll by and typed in the code to see the story (no mouse on those old dumb terminals), and witnessed the system crash. Just goes to show, Jerry is more powerful than all the important financial news that flashes on Bloomberg news!” Lpcook was unavailable for comment.
Corroborating the story, The LA Times reported on the day of Garcia’s death that “Wall Street professionals called up the news on Bloomberg news service terminals that the system froze briefly around noon.”
Jon Friedman, a financial reporter, noted in a 2014 piece that this was one of only two instances that the terminal has ever frozen.
Losing even minutes of real-time data is a huge hit to investors and traders alike, but, even for Dead Heads, it’s an interesting tidbit of history.
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