Bloomberg's trading platform is one of the most popular and useful tools for traders and investors, meaning when it goes offline, so does the investing world.

That is exactly what happened this week in the UK, where the UK Debt Management Office had to postpone a $4.5 billion auction of Treasury bills, part of a weekly sale.

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The shutdown was so severe that the Bank of England had to update the market, stating it had all the tools to ensure financial stability and to provide market liquidity, if that became necessary.

More than 300,000 people worldwide use Bloomberg trading terminals, making it an essential part of everyday life as an investor or trader. One of the features that makes Bloomberg the best is stability, and this is one of the rare occasions where the trading platform failed.

Considering the size of Bloomberg's user base and the price of its trading platform -- $20,000 per year -- it needs to be operational every single day, or risk losing market share to other trading providers like Reuters.

"We experienced a combination of hardware and software failures in the network, which caused an excessive volume of network traffic," said Bloomberg in a statement.

"This led to customer disconnections as a result of the machines being overwhelmed. We discovered the root cause quickly, isolated the faulty hardware, and restarted the software. We are reviewing our multiple redundant systems, which failed to prevent this disruption."

Even though there were other ways to trade during the London hours, most financial organizations shut down due to Bloomberg's system issues. The UK DMO held its auction later that day for Treasury bills, after Bloomberg confirmed all issues had been resolved.

This is the first time since 2012 that the market has been offline for longer than a few minutes. Facebook's IPO in 2012 sent the NASDAQ stock market offline for the full day, resulting in a $10 million fine to the organization for failing to keep it online and stable.

The London Stock Exchange's last failure was reported in 2011, when it went down for four hours for maintenance. The UK has been providing financial support to make sure all systems are up to date, alongside offering more integrated partnerships with banks.

Tagsbloomberg, London, Treasury bills, The Bank of England, UK Debt Management Office