CME attributed the outage, which halted operations for more than 11 hours, to a cooling failure at a data center in Chicago.
Global futures markets were thrown into chaos for several hours after CME Group, the world's largest foreign exchange dealer, suffered one of its longest outages in years, halting trading in stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies.
Trading in currency, stock and bond futures, as well as other products, resumed at 13:35 GMT on Friday after being paralyzed for more than 11 hours due to an outage at a major data centre, according to LSEG data.
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CME attributed the outage to a cooling failure in data centers managed by CyrusOne, which said its Chicago-area facilities had affected services for customers, including CME.
The outage prevented trading of major currency pairs on CME's EBS platform, as well as benchmark futures for West Texas Intermediate crude oil, the Nasdaq 100, the Nikkei, palm oil and gold, according to LSEG data.
'A black eye'
Trading volumes have slowed this week due to the US Thanksgiving holiday, and as traders look to close positions by the end of the month, there was a risk that volatility could rise sharply later, market participants said.
“It's a black eye for the CME and probably a belated reminder of the importance of market structure and how interconnected they all are,” said Ben Laidler, head of equity strategy at Bradesco BBI.
“We complacently assume that a lot of the timing is, frankly, not the best. It's the end of the month, a lot of things are rebalancing.”
“That said, it could have been a lot worse; it's going to be a very low volume day. If you're going to have it, there would have been worse days to have a crash like this,” he said.
Futures are a mainstay of financial markets and are used by traders, speculators and companies who want to hedge or hold positions in a wide range of underlying assets. Without these and other instruments, brokers were left in the dark and many were reluctant to trade contracts without real prices for hours on end.
“Beyond the immediate risk of traders being unable to close positions – and the potential costs that come with them – the incident raises broader reliability concerns,” said Axel Rudolph, senior technical analyst at trading platform IG.
Some European brokerages said earlier in the day that they had been unable to offer trading in some products on certain futures contracts.
Regulators are monitoring the situation, with both the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission confirming that they are aware of the issue and conducting ongoing monitoring.
The largest exchange operator
CME is the largest exchange operator by market value and says it offers the widest range of reference products, spanning rates, stocks, metals, energy, cryptocurrencies and agriculture.
Average daily derivatives volume was 26.3 million contracts in October, CME said earlier this month.
Friday's CME outage comes more than a decade after the trader had to shut down electronic trading for some agricultural contracts in April 2014 due to technical issues, which at the time sent traders back into the ground.
More recently, in 2024, disruptions at LSEG and Switzerland's stock exchange operator briefly disrupted the markets.
CME's own shares rose 0.4 percent in premarket trading.
