Global futures markets were disrupted for hours on Friday after a cooling system failure at a Chicago-area data center brought trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to a halt. The outage affected futures, options, currencies, bonds, and commodities, freezing portions of the world’s most heavily used derivatives infrastructure and forcing brokers across multiple continents to wait for price feeds to return.
CME Group said all of its markets were fully restored by 8:30 a.m. ET, though some services came back online in phases. Bonds and metals resumed trading earlier in the morning, while index futures and options took longer to return. EBS, CME’s major foreign exchange platform, reopened about 90 minutes after its European subsidiary BrokerTec EU restarted operations.
The disruption stemmed from a cooling failure at CyrusOne’s CHI1 data center, where multiple chillers went offline on November 27. CyrusOne said its engineering teams and outside mechanical contractors were on site throughout the night working to stabilize the facility. Several cooling units were restarted at limited capacity, and temporary cooling equipment was deployed to manage temperatures until full repairs can be completed.
“We are working around the clock to restore normal operations,” CyrusOne said in a statement, adding that it remained in direct contact with affected clients. The company apologized for the interruption and said it was taking steps to prevent any further issues.
For CME, the outage came during a relatively quiet period in U.S. markets, falling just after the Thanksgiving holiday and ahead of month-end rebalancing. Still, the freeze left traders in Asian and European time zones dealing with a lack of live price information for extended stretches. Without updated futures prices, brokers were hesitant to place orders, creating pockets of uncertainty across multiple asset classes.
Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth, described the timing as fortunate given the low trading volume typical of the day, adding that a failure during a busier session could have created far more complications. “It appears they are gradually starting to restore some operations,” he said. “All told this could have been much worse.”
Traders abroad felt the disruption more acutely. Emir Syazwan, a futures trader in Kuala Lumpur, said he spent hours on the phone with his broker as activity stalled. He noted that markets had already been trading within a tight range this week and expected that behavior to continue until CME’s systems were fully stabilized.
Outages of this scale are uncommon but not unheard of. CME faced technical difficulties in 2014 that temporarily halted electronic trading in certain agricultural contracts. More recently, brief interruptions at LSEG and Switzerland’s SIX exchange caused short delays in equities and bond markets.
CME Group, which handles derivatives across energy, agriculture, metals, interest rates, equities, and cryptocurrencies, processes more than 26 million contracts per day on average. The company said its teams would continue monitoring system performance throughout the day to ensure markets remain stable.
Despite the disruption, CME shares were slightly higher in premarket trading, suggesting investors viewed the event as contained. Market participants will be watching closely to see whether any pricing irregularities emerge once the week concludes and month-end flows settle.
This image is the property of The New Dispatch LLC and is not licenseable for external use without explicit written permission.
