CME Group temporarily halted trading across its flagship Globex platform after a cooling system failure at a third‑party data centre disrupted core infrastructure.
The outage, which began in the early hours of Friday’s shortened U.S. trading session, froze price updates and order flow in major futures linked to equities, commodities, foreign exchange, and crypto markets.
CME Experiences Cooling Failure at CyrusOne Data Centre
According to notices on CME’s system‑alert page and statements to media, the exchange halted trading after a “cooling issue” at data centres operated by CyrusOne in the Chicago area impacted key matching engines. CME said all Globex futures and options markets, its EBS foreign‑exchange platform, and Bursa Malaysia Derivatives (BMD) products were paused while engineers worked to restore safe operating temperatures and confirm system integrity.
CyrusOne later confirmed that its CHI1 facility suffered a chiller plant failure affecting multiple cooling units, forcing the deployment of temporary cooling equipment and a phased restart of permanent systems. The incident highlights how tightly global trading now depends on specialised data‑centre infrastructure, where mechanical failures can have market‑wide consequences even without any cyberattack or software bug.
Industry Outlook
The halt froze contracts tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500, and Nasdaq‑100, as well as gold, crude oil, and key FX pairs, during a period of already thin liquidity following the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. Traders in Asia and Europe reported receiving notification shortly before 03:00 GMT that all futures and options on Globex were under suspension, with one describing the situation as a “nightmare” given open risk positions and no immediate ability to hedge.
The outage also took down CME’s regulated Bitcoin and Ethereum futures, temporarily removing a primary institutional venue for crypto derivatives trading. Market analysts warned that extended downtime could distort price discovery across interconnected markets, though the incident occurred on a relatively quiet calendar day.
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