Chicago, United States, November 28, 2025- Trading on CME Group’s futures and options platforms was halted for several hours after the exchange reported a cooling failure at CyrusOne-operated data centres, an outage that froze prices across major asset classes and exposed fragility in concentrated market infrastructure.
“Due to a cooling issue at CyrusOne data centers, our markets are currently halted. Support is working to resolve the issue in the near term and will advise clients of Pre-Open details as soon as they are available,” CME said in its Global Command Center alerts and social posts.
The disruption affected CME’s Globex electronic trading as well as the EBS foreign-exchange platform, leaving benchmark prices for S&P 500 and Nasdaq futures, US Treasuries, WTI crude and gold effectively frozen during the outage.
Some markets last recorded trades late on Thursday, and that the interruption carried into the thin, post-Thanksgiving session on Friday. Brokers temporarily suspended client trading or relied on internal price models while systems were unavailable.
CME posted a sequence of Global Command Center system alerts through the night, repeatedly attributing the stoppage to the CyrusOne cooling issue and notifying clients that support teams were working to restore services and would announce pre-open timings. The alerts show the pause affected multiple market segments in quick succession, BMD, EBS Market & Direct, and Globex futures and options, underscoring how a single infrastructure fault cascaded across clearing and price-discovery channels.
Market participants described elevated operational risk as order books and reference prices went dark. Several brokerages and trading desks told reporters they either suspended automated strategies or turned to alternative liquidity sources where possible; some exchanges that rely on CME’s feeds, notably Bursa Malaysia’s derivatives platform, also paused activity because of the knock-on dependency. Traders warned that the timing, at a month-end and holiday-thin session, intensified the disruption.
CyrusOne and CME said they were working together to identify root causes and restore full services; initial public statements focused on immediate remediation rather than technical root-cause detail. Industry analysts and exchange veterans noted the incident highlights the concentration risk inherent in modern electronic markets, where a handful of colocated facilities and a small number of service providers sit at the heart of global price formation. Regulators and exchanges typically follow such outages with post-incident reviews; market participants said they expect formal after-action reporting once systems are fully recovered.
