Posted by An outage at CME Group has halted trading in a wide range of derivatives, including FX, commodities, Treasuries and major US stock index futures, due to a cooling failure at its data centres linked to provider CyrusOne.
What happened
- CME Group reported that all its markets on the Globex electronic platform are currently halted because of a cooling issue at CyrusOne data centres that support its infrastructure.
- The issue has paused trading on its popular EBS foreign exchange platform as well, with CME saying support teams are working to resolve the problem and will issue pre-open details once available.
Affected markets
- The halt affects futures and options across foreign exchange, commodities, Treasuries and equities, including contracts tied to the S&P 500 and Nasdaq indexes, as well as benchmarks like West Texas Intermediate crude, gold and various FX pairs.
- Prices in some of these contracts stopped updating on data feeds such as LSEG, leaving brokers and market-makers without live exchange prices and prompting some firms to pull or re-source affected products.
Market impact so far
- Traders in Asia were notified of the halt shortly before 0300 GMT, and the outage has contributed to an unusually slow session that was already expected to see thin liquidity after the US Thanksgiving holiday.
- Some brokers have described the situation as highly disruptive, with increased operational and pricing risk, and anticipate additional volatility once CME markets reopen and normal price discovery resumes.
How to think about this as a trader
- Until CME’s Globex and EBS systems are fully restored and a clear pre-open schedule is published, electronic trading in affected futures and options will remain unavailable, so execution and hedging strategies that rely on those markets may need temporary alternatives or reduced size.
- Spot FX and alternative venues remain available, but with core futures benchmarks frozen, price signals and cross-asset correlations may be less reliable than usual, so risk limits, margin usage and overnight exposure should be reviewed conservatively.
