In Texas, the reserves are being depleted, while at the same time overall demand for the gas has been growing.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/05/09/helium-short...

"In 1996, the US Congress decided to sell off the strategic reserve and the consequence was that the market was swelled with cheap helium because its price was not determined by the market. The motivation was to sell it all by 2015"

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/discovery-of-massive...

That would normally be the job of the journalist that wrote the article. ‘dafuq, Bloomberg? “You know, the helium shortage.” No, I don’t know, Bloomberg. Is it related to the sell-off of U. S. helium reserves a while back? Or is it something different this time?

Instead, we get “will your kids get balloons at their party this year?” Oh, and some brief mention about pharma, but we don’t really know how that works, so...yeah.