Global Futures Reopen After CME Suffers Data Center Cooling Failure
The world’s largest exchange operator by market value, CME Group, suffered a major technical failure that brought global derivatives trading to a standstill for several hours on Friday.
The disruption, which CME confirmed in a series of posts on X, was a “cooling issue at CyrusOne data centers,” affecting a wide range of futures contracts, from major stock indices and currencies to energy and metals.
The problem originated at the CyrusOne CHI1 data center facility in the Chicago area. CyrusOne, the Dallas-headquartered firm that operates the facility, revealed the technical breakdown in an email to CNBC, stating, “On November 27, our CHI1 facility experienced a chiller plant failure affecting multiple cooling units.”
The failure of the cooling system directly affected the core infrastructure of CME’s electronic trading platform, Globex. This system powers the trade of futures and options across multiple asset classes, and its failure essentially froze the price discovery mechanism for critical global benchmarks, including futures for West Texas Intermediate crude, gold, and the Nasdaq 100.
The CME first alerted the public to the halt on X late Thursday night, stating, “Due to a cooling issue at CyrusOne data centers, our markets are currently halted.” It added that its support teams were “working to resolve the issue in the near term and will advise clients of Pre-Open details as soon as they are available.”
Global impact and trader reaction
The outage, which lasted over 11 hours for some services, rippled across global financial centers. Traders in the European and Asian sessions were most immediately affected, as the halt occurred during the late-night and early-morning hours in the US, following the Thanksgiving holiday.
Emir Syazwan, a futures trader at Ninefold Trading Co. in Kuala Lumpur, told CNBC he had been on the phone with his broker “throughout the afternoon” local time as the issue persisted. Syazwan noted the timing was inconvenient, though not unprecedented, adding that the incident could “materially alter market structure or price discovery.”
Ben Laidler, head of equity strategy at Bradesco BBI, described the extensive halt as “a black eye to the CME and probably an overdue reminder of the importance of market structure and how interconnected all these are,” according to Reuters. The timing, coinciding with month-end activities and thin holiday volumes, heightened fears of potential volatility when trading resumed.
CyrusOne confirmed to CNBC that its engineering teams were working on-site to resolve the failure, stating they had “successfully restarted several chillers at limited capacity and have deployed temporary cooling equipment to supplement our permanent systems.”
Resumption of trading
CME Group markets gradually began to return online later in the day. The foreign exchange platform EBS markets and BrokerTec EU markets were among the first services to resume operations.
By 2:46 PM Central Time, CME Group declared the issue resolved, posting on X: “All CME Group markets are open and trading.”
Though trading is now fully restored, market watchers say a prolonged halt raises serious questions about the resilience of the financial market’s core digital infrastructure and the potential single point of failure within a global, interconnected derivatives ecosystem.
A recent analysis looks at how the rush to build AI data centers is pushing global infrastructure to its limits.
About Author
