CME Outage Halts Global Derivatives Trading After Data Centre Cooling Failure

Trading across Chicago Mercantile Exchange futures and options markets ceased for several hours on Friday following a cooling system failure at an external data centre, suspending activity in foreign exchange, fixed income, equity and commodity derivatives globally.

The disruption affected a broad spectrum of contracts, including crude oil, United States Treasury instruments and S&P 500 futures, with the suspension exceeding the duration of a similar incident in 2019. The outage underscored the systemic importance of CME Group and its Globex electronic trading platform to global financial market infrastructure.

Market participants confronted the possibility of forfeiting an entire trading session as technical teams worked to restore service. A spokesperson for CME Group confirmed that the halt resulted from a cooling malfunction at facilities operated by CyrusOne. The spokesperson stated that support personnel were addressing the issue and would provide updates regarding market reopening schedules. CyrusOne had not responded to enquiries at the time of initial reporting.

Traders noted widespread disruption extending beyond CME’s core offerings, with interruptions reported on EBS, a prominent foreign exchange trading venue, as well as products including gasoline and palm oil that utilise CME infrastructure. West Texas Intermediate crude futures last registered transactions at 10:47 am Singapore time before the suspension took effect.

Nick Twidale, chief analyst at AT Global Markets in Sydney, characterised the impact on market functioning, observing that a major source of liquidity had been removed from global markets. The timing of the outage coincided with the closure of US markets on Thursday for the Thanksgiving holiday, potentially compounding the effect on trading volumes and price discovery mechanisms.

The incident raises questions about resilience and redundancy arrangements for critical market infrastructure, particularly given the concentration of derivatives trading activity on electronic platforms operated by a small number of exchange groups. Regulatory authorities and market operators have previously emphasised the importance of robust business continuity planning following past technology failures at major exchanges.