A cooling failure at a major data center halted trading across key futures benchmarks, leaving brokers without live pricing and raising concerns about volatility.
CME Trading Outage Shakes Futures and Currency Markets
A significant disruption hit global markets after a technical failure forced the CME Group to halt trading across several major futures and foreign exchange products. The outage, triggered by a cooling malfunction at CyrusOne data centers, stopped price updates for key benchmarks in commodities, equities, Treasuries and FX.
Futures tied to West Texas Intermediate crude, 10-year U.S. Treasuries, the S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, Nikkei, gold and palm oil were among the contracts that stopped updating for hours, according to market data feeds. Prices on the EBS FX platform, which handles nearly $60 billion in daily trading, also froze in major currency pairs such as euro/dollar and dollar/yen.
Brokers across Europe temporarily suspended trading in impacted products due to the absence of live prices. Some relied on internal models to deliver provisional quotes, taking on what they described as “unnecessary risk.”
Data Center Failure Leaves Traders Expecting Volatility
The disruption began early Friday, with CME reporting the issue shortly after 0240 GMT. CyrusOne, which runs more than 55 data centers globally, has not yet commented publicly on the cause or timeline for restoration.
Analysts warned that the outage could spark heightened volatility, especially as futures play a central role in global hedging and speculative strategies. Average daily derivatives volume at CME exceeded 26 million contracts in October, underscoring the scale of the disruption.
Several brokers, including Saxo Bank and XTB, notified clients that they had suspended access to selected U.S. index, Treasury and commodity futures until normal pricing resumed.
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