Chicago: Global financial markets experienced an unprecedented disruption on Thursday after a cooling-system failure at a key Chicago-based data centre forced the CME Group, the world’s largest derivatives exchange operator, to halt trading across multiple asset classes. The outage affected futures and options contracts on commodities, equities, foreign exchange, and U.S. Treasuries, leaving traders and investors grappling with uncertainty in a market already sensitive at the month-end.
The disruption originated from a malfunction in the cooling infrastructure at CyrusOne’s CHI1 data centre, which hosts CME’s main electronic trading platform, Globex. As temperatures rose inside the facility, servers automatically shut down to prevent damage, causing the entire electronic trading ecosystem to freeze. Contracts linked to energy commodities such as crude oil and natural gas, metals including gold and silver, agricultural products, and major equity-index futures like the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 all came to a standstill. Even key foreign exchange pairs on the EBS platform, handling tens of billions of dollars daily, were impacted as price updates stopped flowing. Brokers across the world, including firms such as CMC Markets, either suspended trading or relied on internal mechanisms to mitigate risk, although the lack of live prices rendered many of these efforts ineffective.
Market analysts described the outage as one of the longest and most widespread in recent memory, emphasizing the vulnerability of modern electronic trading infrastructures. The timing of the incident compounded its impact, occurring immediately after the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday and during the critical month-end period when contracts frequently roll over or expire. This created heightened volatility and increased the risk for traders, corporations, and institutional investors who rely on futures and options for hedging purposes.
CME Group later announced that Globex had resumed trading with a pre-open at 7:30 a.m. Central Time (13:30 GMT). Market activity gradually restarted, though participants proceeded cautiously, aware that pent-up orders and disrupted liquidity could drive sharp price movements. The incident has reignited discussions about the resilience of traditional air-cooled data centres, with industry experts advocating for redundant infrastructure and advanced cooling solutions such as liquid cooling to handle the growing heat generated by AI workloads, cloud computing, and high-frequency trading systems.
The outage also raised broader questions for regulators and risk managers regarding the systemic vulnerability of critical financial infrastructure. A single technical fault in Chicago sent ripples across global markets, illustrating the interconnectedness of modern trading platforms and the need for robust contingency planning. Financial institutions are now reassessing risk protocols and exploring technological upgrades to ensure that future disruptions do not threaten market stability. The CME incident serves as a stark reminder that in today’s highly digitized markets, even non-financial issues such as a cooling failure can trigger far-reaching consequences.