The one Bloomberg feature every trader felt lost without

When Bloomberg terminals went down for more than 2 hours on Friday morning, one feature that industry folks particularly missed was the chat tool, known as Instant Bloomberg.

More than 315,000 people use Bloomberg terminals around the world.

Because the outage happened around 3 a.m. EST, most of the people affected were in Europe, where markets were just opening, and Asia, where they were just closing.

One Hong Kong-based banker laid it out in an interview with The New York Times' Chad Bray and Neil Gough: "What I miss is the instant Bloomberg chats, which I rate higher than trading or data feeds. The fact is, Bloomberg connects 100 percent of the Street, and all that human intelligence is what makes markets hum."

Unable to execute trades or make deals, frustrated traders, bankers, and other finance pros took to social media to vent – and to have some fun.

The chat feature was a recurring theme:

One person who works at competitor Thomson Reuters, according to his Twitter profile, jumped on the marketing opportunity:

Later, when the terminal was back up and running, some folks apparently still couldn't access the messaging tool:

But eventually, to everyone's apparent relief, the chat function – and all other Bloomberg functions – were restored:

SEE ALSO: Bloomberg had a massive unexplained outage this morning

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Jeff Bezos Reveals Why He Spends So Little Time Talking To Traders