Late Thursday night (U.S. time), trading across the exchange’s futures and options markets was abruptly suspended when a “cooling issue” struck a data center operated by CyrusOne in Illinois. The disruption impacted virtually all asset classes — from equities, commodities and foreign-exchange to interest-rate, bond and crypto futures — leaving participants unable to trade or close positions for roughly 10–11 hours.
Trading began to resume early Friday morning, with some segments reopening first, followed by a full recovery of the exchange’s platforms. Futures and options trading across the broader markets reportedly restarted by roughly 7:30 a.m. ET.
What Happened & Global Impact
The outage stemmed from a malfunction in the cooling infrastructure at the CyrusOne data-centre facility — overheating forced the electronic trading platform (Globex) to go offline. According to the exchange, the issue began at about 02:40 GMT and forced a complete trading halt.
Because CME Group handles derivatives across a wide array of global markets, the freeze slowed down liquidity and price discovery worldwide. Traders expressed alarm at being locked out of positions or blocked from liquidating during volatile after-holiday trading periods. The interruption touched commodities like oil and metals, equity-index futures, Treasuries, FX, and even crypto futures — raising broader concerns about the fragility of centralized market infrastructure.
With average daily volume of roughly 26–28 million contracts across its futures markets, even a delay of several hours injects significant uncertainty into positions spanning multiple time zones.
What the Resumption Means
As of Friday morning, all of CME’s key platforms — including futures, options, FX and commodity markets — were reported as operational again. Globex, EBS (FX), and BrokerTec (fixed income) markets reopened and resumed trading. Market participants cautiously returned, but many are still evaluating the event’s implications.
The outage underscored persistent risks in highly centralized financial-market infrastructure. For investors and traders, today’s incident serves as a reminder: even major exchanges can go offline unexpectedly — potentially affecting positions, liquidity, and hedging strategies worldwide.
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