CME Group temporarily halted trading across its flagship Globex platform early Friday after a cooling system failure at a third-party data centre disrupted core infrastructure. It marked one of the rare moments when the world’s largest derivatives marketplace was forced offline, freezing price updates and order flow across equities, commodities, FX, and crypto futures.
Trading was paused around 03:00 GMT (Thursday evening U.S. time) as the outage shortened the U.S. session and cut off participants from a primary venue for global hedging and risk management.
CME confirmed the disruption stemmed from a “cooling issue” at CyrusOne’s CHI1 data centre in the Chicago area, where a chiller plant failure affected multiple cooling units. Temporary equipment was deployed while engineers worked to restore safe operating temperatures and verify system integrity. The exchange said all Globex futures and options, its EBS FX platform, and Bursa Malaysia Derivatives products were halted until systems could be stabilised.
CyrusOne later acknowledged the incident, saying the cooling loss required a phased restart of permanent infrastructure. The episode underscores how tightly modern markets depend on specialised data-centre operations, where even mechanical failures, without any cyber component, can produce market-wide ripple effects.
Major Futures and Crypto Contracts Stall After CME Outage
The halt froze contracts tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500, Nasdaq-100, gold, crude oil, and major currency pairs during a period of already thin post-Thanksgiving liquidity.
Traders in Asia and Europe reported receiving notifications minutes before the halt, leaving open positions temporarily unhedged. One futures trader in Singapore described the stop as “a nightmare,” noting the lack of immediate access to offset risk.
The outage also knocked offline CME’s regulated Bitcoin and Ethereum futures, cutting off one of the most important institutional venues for crypto derivatives. While the calendar was relatively quiet, analysts warned that extended downtime could distort price discovery across interconnected markets, particularly in equity index and energy futures, where CME is a central liquidity anchor.
Full trading halts at the CME are very rare, usually happening only during major technical failures or extreme volatility. The exchange has not yet announced a timeline for a full post-incident report. Still, market participants and regulators will expect a detailed explanation of how a single cooling failure caused a cascade through the global trading infrastructure.
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