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CME Halts Trading as Cooling Failure Hits Data Center, Freezing Major Market Benchmarks
A cooling failure at a CyrusOne data center forced CME Group to halt trading in currency, stock futures, and commodities, disrupting major global market benchmarks and freezing price updates across key indices.
CME Group (CME.O) said on Friday that it halted trading in currencies, stock futures, and commodities due to a cooling issue at one of its data centers, freezing price updates across major market benchmarks.
“In light of a cooling issue at the CyrusOne data center, our markets are currently paused,” CME said in a statement. “Support teams are working to resolve the problem as quickly as possible, and clients will be notified once pre-open details are available.”
CyrusOne did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
According to a CME notice, the foreign exchange platform EBS Markets also stopped operations because of a technical problem. Traders said they were alerted to the disruption shortly before 0300 GMT, affecting all futures and options contracts on the Globex platform.
“It’s a nightmare,” one trader said on condition of anonymity, as they were not authorized to speak to the media. CME benchmarks are central to markets ranging from equities to commodities.
LSEG data showed that prices for the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 had not updated since 0344 GMT. Currency pair quotes on the EBS system — heavily used for major pairs like dollar/euro and dollar/yen — were also frozen.
Tony Sycamore, analyst at IG Markets, said: “It’s been a very slow day in Asia following the Thanksgiving holiday, and this outage hasn’t helped — especially with traders looking to wrap up positions at the end of a volatile month.”
