CME Group outage: Future trading stopped as cooling issue at data centers

CME Group has suspended trading of several asset classes due to a major outage.

Summary

• CME Group halted trading due to a cooling issue at one of its data centers.
• The outage has impacted major market indices and key currency pairs on EBS. 

The CME Group, the world’s leading derivatives marketplace, has halted trading activity after a cooling issue at its CyrusOne data centres disrupted its systems.

“Due to a cooling issue at CyrusOne data centres, our markets are currently halted. Support is working to resolve the issue in the near term and will advise clients of Pre-Open details as soon as they are available,” the CME Group said in a statement to Reuters.

For context, CyrusOne is headquartered in Dallas and operates more than 55 data centres across the U.S., Europe, and Japan. The malfunction led to a complete halt in futures, options, and foreign exchange markets operating on Globex.

According to data from LSEG, futures prices for major market indices, including the 10-year U.S. Treasuries, the S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, have not refreshed since the outage. Quotes for traditional commodities, including gold and oil, also remained outdated as of 07:20 GMT.

The CME Group outage also affected the EBS foreign exchange platform, a widely used venue that saw billions in daily trading volume in October in major pairs such as euro/dollar and dollar/yen.

Spot forex traders were among the few able to find other venues to execute deals. However, the outage left brokers without access to live prices, making it difficult for many to complete transactions.

“It’s been a very slow day here in Asia after the Thanksgiving holiday and this hasn’t helped at all, more so given there is interest to transact at the end of what has been a volatile month,” one of the affected traders told Reuters.

CME sees record crypto futures volume

Today’s outage followed a strong month for crypto futures, as CME recorded a sharp surge in activity across digital asset contracts, with average daily volume in October climbing to a record 26.3 million contracts.

While trading activity has since withered due to a broader crypto market downturn, CME has continued expanding its crypto offerings, most recently introducing two new spot-quoted futures contracts for XRP and Solana, scheduled to go live next month.

As previously reported by crypto.news, the CME Group also plans to launch round-the-clock crypto futures and options starting in 2026.