Global futures reopen after exchange operator CME hit by hours-long outage | Financial Markets News

CME blamed the outage on a cooling failure at a data center in Chicago, which halted trading for more than 11 hours.

CME Group, the world’s largest exchange operator, suffered one of the longest outages in years, halting trading in stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies, sending global futures markets into chaos for several hours.

As of 13:35 GMT on Friday, trading in forex, stock and bond futures, as well as other products, had resumed after being closed for more than 11 hours due to an outage at a critical data center, according to LSEG data.

CME attributed the outage to a cooling failure at data centers operated by CyrusOne, saying its Chicago-area facility affected services to customers, including CME.

The disruption halted trading in major currency pairs on CME’s EBS platform, as well as benchmark futures for West Texas Intermediate crude, Nasdaq 100, Nikkei, palm oil and gold, according to LSEG data.

‘a black eye’

Trading volumes have been subdued this week due to the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States and dealers are looking to close out positions at the end of the month, risking a sharp increase in volatility later, market participants said.

“This is a black eye for the CME and perhaps an overdue reminder of the importance of market structure and how interconnected it all is,” said Ben Laidler, head of equity strategy at Bradesco BBI.

“We complacently assume that most of the time it’s clearly not good. It’s the end of the month, a lot of things get rebalanced.”

“Having said that, it could have been much worse; it would be a very low-volume day. If you’re going to take it, there would be worse days for this kind of breakdown,” he said.

Futures are a mainstay of the financial markets and are used by dealers, speculators and businesses wishing to hedge or maintain positions in a wide range of underlying assets. Without these and other tools, brokers were left blind, and reluctant to trade contracts with no live prices for many hours.

“In addition to the immediate risk of traders being unable to close out positions – and the potential costs that follow – this incident raises broader concerns about reliability,” said Axel Rudolph, senior technical analyst at Trading Platform IG.

Some European brokerages said earlier in the day that they were unable to offer trading in certain products on some futures contracts.

largest exchange operator

CME is the largest exchange operator by market cap and says it offers the widest range of benchmark products spanning rates, equities, metals, energy, cryptocurrencies and agriculture.

CME said earlier this month that average daily derivatives volume in October was 26.3 million contracts.

The CME outage on Friday came more than a decade after the operator shut down electronic trading for some agricultural contracts in April 2014 due to technical problems, sending traders back to the floor at the time.

More recently, in 2024, outages at LSEG and Switzerland’s exchange operator briefly disrupted the market.

CME’s own shares were up 0.4 percent in premarket trading.