A significant technical outage has paralyzed trading operations at CME Group, one of the world’s leading derivatives marketplaces.
CME Halts Trading Activities
As reported by Reuters, the exchange operator was forced to halt activity across its foreign exchange, commodities, Treasuries, and equity futures platforms on Friday following a physical infrastructure failure at a third-party facility.
The disruption stems from a critical cooling system malfunction at CyrusOne data centers, which houses essential infrastructure for the exchange.
CME released a statement confirming the “cooling issue” and assured clients that technical support teams are actively working to resolve the situation in the near term.
The exchange promised to provide pre-open details as soon as the systems are stabilized. CyrusOne, a Dallas-based operator of over 55 data centers globally, had not issued a comment at the time of the Reuters report.
Which Markets Are Affected?
The halt, which traders report began just before 0300 GMT, is extensive. It affects all futures and options contracts on the Globex platform. LSEG Data indicates that price updates have ceased for major global benchmarks, including:
- West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude
- U.S. Treasury futures
- S&P 500 futures
- Palm oil and gold
Additionally, the EBS foreign exchange platform—a vital hub for trading heavily traded currency pairs like the euro/dollar and dollar/yen—is currently offline, though traders indicated they were able to execute trades on alternative venues.
Glitch Happens On A Truncated Trading Day
The timing adds complexity to an already unusual trading day. With U.S. markets returning for a shortened session following the Thanksgiving holiday, liquidity was expected to be thin.
However, the outage has frustrated those attempting to manage positions. Tony Sycamore, a market analyst at IG, told Reuters that while it had been a slow day in Asia, the outage is unhelpful given the “interest to transact at the end of what has been a volatile month.”
But pre-market trading was in place, as SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSE:SPY) and Invesco QQQ Trust ETF (NASDAQ:QQQ), which track the S&P 500 index and Nasdaq 100 index, respectively, were higher in premarket on Friday. The SPY was up 0.29% at $681.66, while the QQQ advanced 0.33% to $616.31, according to Benzinga Pro data.
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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
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