U.S. stock index futures faced a complete freeze on Friday due to a significant data outage at CME Group, the world’s largest exchange operator. This disruption halted trading across various sectors, including currencies, commodities, Treasuries, and stocks, leaving investors in a state of uncertainty just before a shortened trading session.
The CME Group first reported the issue at 9:40 p.m. ET on its website, attributing the outage to a cooling problem in its CyrusOne data centers. Major futures products such as S&P 500 futures, Nasdaq 100 futures, and Dow futures all registered their last trades at 09:44 p.m. ET on November 27, underscoring the extent of the disruption.
Christopher Peters, head of trading at Accendo Markets in London, commented on the situation, stating, “At the moment, it’s more frustration. As long as the resolution is in place within the next couple of hours, I would have thought it was going to have limited impact if any to our business at this point in time.”
Market activity was expected to be subdued, following the Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday. In the absence of futures trading, investors turned their attention to exchange-traded funds that track the main indexes on Wall Street as alternative indicators of market sentiment. In premarket trading, notable movements included a 0.3% uptick in SPDR’s S&P 500 ETF and a 0.4% rise in Invesco’s QQQ Trust, which tracks the Nasdaq. The Dow-focused ETF also saw a modest increase of 0.3%, all while trading volumes remained light.
Despite the freeze on index futures, shares of U.S.-listed companies seemed to be functioning normally in premarket trading sessions. However, shares of CME Group itself fell approximately 0.7% amid the ongoing difficulties, indicating that the disruption also negatively affected the exchange’s stock performance.
