A significant data center outage disrupted futures and options trading early Friday, leaving investors without crucial market information for over 10 hours. The outage occurred at a facility in Illinois operated by CyrusOne and began Thursday night due to overheating, marking the longest trading disruption of its kind in years.
CME Group, the Chicago-based exchange operator, confirmed that trading resumed mid-morning Friday for futures linked to U.S. stock indexes, Treasurys, gold, crude oil, and other essential markets. Despite the resumption, the holiday-shortened trading session around Thanksgiving traditionally sees lighter volume, resulting in many brokers hesitant to trade contracts without access to live pricing overnight.
While the Chicago Mercantile Exchange faced this significant setback, other exchanges such as NYSE and Nasdaq continued normal operations in premarket trading, easing some concerns for the broader market.
Ben Laidler, head of equity strategy at Bradesco BBI, commented, “It could have been a lot worse; it’ll be a very low volume day. If you’re going to have it, there would have been worse days to have a breakdown like this.”
Reports indicate that traders were initially unaware of the severity of the outage. An oil trader in Singapore initially dismissed an alert about market issues as a hoax since trades and quotes were still flowing. However, moments later, the trader experienced a screen freeze and was forcibly logged out of CME’s Nymex trading platform, highlighting the immediate risks associated with trading disruptions.
This incident has ignited broader concerns regarding the reliability of trading platforms. Axel Rudolph, a senior technical analyst at trading platform IG, noted, “Beyond the immediate risk of traders being unable to close positions—and the potential costs that follow—the incident raises broader concerns about reliability.”
While the technical failure coincided with a period of typically low trading volume, experts have warned that such thin activity could amplify price movements, making market conditions more volatile.
CME Group manages a large volume of transactions daily, processing $1.5 trillion in equity index futures and options along with $9.6 trillion in notional value for interest-rate bets. The exchange is the largest operator by market value and claims to offer the broadest range of benchmark products, particularly in rates, equities, metals, energy, cryptocurrencies, and agriculture.
This outage represents one of CME’s most significant technical difficulties in recent years. Previous issues have included a major outage in 2019 and disruptions caused by technical problems in 2014 that affected trading on the Globex electronic system impacting agricultural contracts.
CyrusOne, headquartered in Dallas, has a portfolio of data centers around the globe and was acquired for approximately $15 billion by KKR and Global Infrastructure Partners in 2022. CME Group operates several major exchanges, including the New York Mercantile Exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade, and Comex. It originally began as the Chicago Butter and Egg Board in 1898, focusing on agricultural products before expanding its offerings.
