USDCME Cooling Failure Freezes Global Futures, FX and Commodity Trading
Massive Outage Hits CME’s Globex and EBS Platforms, Triggering Market-Wide Pricing Paralysis
TL;DR
- CME Group halted trading across futures, options, rates, commodities and FX due to a cooling-system breakdown at a CyrusOne data center.
- Equity index, crude oil, gold, Treasury, and major FX pairs such as EUR/USD and USD/JPY went dark, leaving traders without live price feeds.
- The outage collided with post-Thanksgiving low liquidity and month-end rollovers, raising systemic risk across financial markets.
Traders woke up to a market blackout on November 28, 2025, after CME Group halted trading across its core derivatives platforms, including Globex futures and options and the EBS foreign-exchange system. A cooling-system failure at a CyrusOne-operated data center cut access to pricing and execution for one of the world’s most relied-upon financial infrastructure hubs. CME confirmed the shutdown and told participants it was working on restoration procedures, stating that markets would remain halted until engineers stabilized the system and provided a timeline for reopening.
Disruption spread instantly. Benchmarks linked to U.S. equities — including S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 futures — stopped updating alongside crude oil (WTI), gold, and a wide suite of commodity contracts. U.S. Treasury futures froze, removing a key global reference for interest-rate expectations. FX markets felt the shock as well: the EBS platform went offline, freezing trading in core currency pairs such as EUR/USD and USD/JPY and leaving dealers without live liquidity. Some brokers suspended execution entirely, while others attempted to build pricing internally, producing uneven spreads and elevated exposure risk due to lack of transparency or confirmed market depth.
Timing added fuel to the disruption. The outage hit just after U.S. Thanksgiving during traditionally thin participation and ahead of month-end positioning when hedges, rolls, and settlement flows normally peak. With benchmarks offline, traders were left holding unpriced risk — positions could not be adjusted, marked to market, or hedged, raising concern over potential volatility once execution resumed. Market participants described the moment as chaotic, with several desks reporting they were effectively blind, forced to hold risk without reference rates or futures pricing history.
Attention has turned to infrastructure resilience. CyrusOne operates more than 55 global facilities, yet redundancy did not prevent the blackout from freezing multiple asset classes simultaneously. The breakdown highlighted how concentrated the modern trading ecosystem has become, where a single cooling-system fault can cascade into a global pricing freeze across equities, commodities, FX, and even digital-asset exposure. This fragility matters beyond traditional finance — crypto derivatives that depend on CME futures benchmarks for institutional pricing signals could face index distortion until the market stabilizes, affecting models like crypto price index calculations or spot-referenced valuations tied to coin market cap standards.
CME technicians continued restoration work throughout the day and committed to issue reopening guidance once systems recovered. The episode now sits as one of the most significant operational failures since the exchange’s last major outage in 2019, a stark reminder of how crucial — and vulnerable — centralized market infrastructure remains.
This article has been refined and enhanced by ChatGPT.
