CME Glitch Ripples Across Global Markets, Disrupting Futures Trading

• A cooling-system failure at a CyrusOne data center in Chicago triggered a prolonged trading halt across CME Group’s entire Globex platform, stopping futures and options trading in equities, Treasuries, FX, energy, metals, and commodities – longer than the exchange’s last comparable outage in 2019.
• The disruption hit on a critical Friday that included the monthly roll, physical-delivery expiry for gasoline and diesel futures, and $600 billion notional S&P 500 options expiration on CBOE, severely impairing delta-hedging and causing spreads to blow out across multiple markets.
• With CME’s dominant liquidity suddenly removed on the sidelines ahead of the post-Thanksgiving U.S. session, traders faced sharply reduced price discovery and heightened risk of exaggerated moves in an already fragile market environment.

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange suffered a prolonged trading halt across its entire Globex electronic platform after a cooling-system failure at a CyrusOne-operated data center in the Chicago area disabled critical infrastructure. Engineering teams restarted several chillers and installed temporary cooling units, yet no firm timeline for full restoration has been provided, making this outage already longer than the comparable hours-long disruption CME experienced in 2019.

The stoppage paralyzed futures and options trading in equities, fixed income, foreign exchange, energy, metals, and agricultural commodities. Millions of contracts tied to the S&P 500 (SPX), Nasdaq 100 (NDX), and Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) that normally trade virtually around the clock were rendered inaccessible, while U.S. Treasury futures, among the most liquid fixed-income benchmarks globally, also ceased trading. EBS, a major institutional FX venue owned by CME Group Inc. (CME), was simultaneously impaired, severely widening bid-offer spreads in currency markets.

Friday’s timing compounded the disruption. It coincided with the monthly options expiration on the CBOE, where contracts on the S&P 500 representing approximately $600 billion in notional value were scheduled to settle. Although those options themselves trade on a separate exchange, market makers and proprietary trading firms rely heavily on CME-listed E-mini and Micro E-mini futures for delta hedging. With those futures unavailable, dealers reportedly widened quotes dramatically or withdrew them entirely, while some attempted imperfect substitutes through ETFs or Euro Stoxx futures. In physical-delivery energy markets, Friday additionally marked the expiration of gasoline and diesel futures, raising the prospect of delivery notices being issued in highly illiquid conditions.

Early evidence of market stress appeared immediately. Gold spreads in London blew out to roughly 20 times their normal width, U.S. crude oil benchmarks moved erratically, and palm oil trading on the unaffected Bursa Malaysia nonetheless suffered spillover volatility. Liquidity rapidly migrated to whatever alternative venues remained operational, though none could fully replace CME’s depth.

The incident exposes the concentrated operational risk embedded in modern market structure. A single third-party data center’s cooling malfunction was sufficient to remove one of the world’s largest sources of derivatives liquidity across multiple asset classes simultaneously. CME operates the Chicago Board of Trade, New York Mercantile Exchange, and Commodity Exchange under its umbrella, and its partial ownership of other venues, including the Gulf Mercantile Exchange, meant the impact extended beyond its core U.S. platforms.

Trading desks described an environment of near-total opacity for U.S. price discovery ahead of the post-Thanksgiving shortened session. With no U.S. economic releases scheduled and the Federal Reserve entering its pre-meeting blackout period, the fundamental news flow was expected to remain light, yet the technical vacuum itself became the dominant risk. November’s earlier equity volatility, during which the S&P 500 had fallen as much as 4.7% before recovering sharply, had only just subsided; the sudden removal of futures markets threatened to reintroduce sharp directional risk without the usual continuous hedging and arbitrage mechanisms in place.

While power and network redundancy receive extensive attention in exchange contingency planning, the event demonstrates that ancillary systems such as data-center cooling remain single points of failure capable of producing cascading, multi-hour outages. Until Globex is fully restored, price transparency and executable liquidity in many of the world’s most important risk-transfer markets will remain materially impaired.

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