Global futures markets were thrown into chaos for several hours after CME Group, the world’s largest exchange operator, suffered one of its longest outages in years, halting trading across stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies.
By 13:35 GMT on Friday, trading in foreign exchange, stock and bond futures as well as other products had resumed, after having been knocked out for more than 11 hours because of an outage at an important data centre, according to LSEG data.
CME blamed the outage on a cooling failure at data centres run by CyrusOne, which said its Chicago-area facility had affected services for customers, including CME.
The disruption stopped trading in major currency pairs on CME’s EBS platform, as well as benchmark futures for West Texas Intermediate crude, Nasdaq 100, Nikkei, palm oil and gold, according to LSEG data.
Trading volumes have been thinned out this week by the United States Thanksgiving holiday, and with dealers looking to close positions for the end of the month, there was a risk of volatility picking up sharply later on, market participants said.
“It’s a black eye to the CME and probably an overdue reminder of the importance of market structure and how interconnected all these are,” Ben Laidler, head of equity strategy at Bradesco BBI, said.
“We complacently take for granted that much of the timing is frankly not great. It’s month-end, a lot of things get rebalanced.”
“Having said that, 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,” he said.
Futures are a mainstay of financial markets and are used by dealers, speculators and businesses wishing to hedge or hold positions in a wide range of underlying assets. Without these and other instruments, brokers were left flying blind, and many were reluctant to trade contracts with no live prices for hours on end.
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