FX, commods and stock futures hit by longest CME outage in years

ME is the biggest exchange operator by market value and says it offers the widest range of benchmark products, spanning rates, equities, metals, energy, cryptocurrencies and agriculture. It first posted about outages at 0240 GMT on its website. Futures prices for West Texas Intermediate crude , 10-year U.S. Treasuries , the S&P 500 , Nasdaq 100 , Nikkei , palm oil and gold were among those not updated by 1100 GMT on Friday, according to LSEG Data. Prices were also not updated on the EBS foreign exchange platform, which traded an average of almost $60 billion daily in October, in major pairs such as euro/dollar and dollar/yen. While spot forex traders were more easily able to find other venues to execute deals, the outages left brokers flying blind and many reluctant to trade contracts with no live prices.

As it says the cooling system at the data center operated by CyrusOne. The malfunction halted trading across global markets, including futures and options on equities, foreign exchange, bonds, and commodities, disrupting operations for over 11 hours.

The outage impacted key platforms such as CME's EBS Market & Direct markets and Globex Futures & Options, which handles 90% of CME Group’s trading volume.

Trading in foreign exchange, stock, and bond futures resumed by 13:35 GMT on the same day, following the restart of the Globex platform at 8:30 a.m. New York time.

The CME Globex FX Spot Plus markets opened at 08:30 Central Time, though all day orders and good-till-date (GTD) orders with that date were cancelled, while good-till-cancelled (GTC) orders acknowledged prior to the outage remained active.

Engineering teams worked to resolve the issue by restarting chillers and deploying temporary cooling equipment, but a full resumption of normal operations was not immediately confirmed.

The incident marks one of the longest outages in CME Group’s history, surpassing previous technical disruptions such as the 2014 outage that halted electronic trading for agricultural contracts.

The outage has prompted concerns about the resilience of critical financial infrastructure dependent on data center reliability.

They need to create a reduncancy capability, for emergencies such as this, that can quickly be switched over to prevent long outages ehen these types of catastrophic failures occur. Usually these redundant systems, are located at a different location, in case of fires or natural disasters, and syncing takes place after usage is at its minimum.

“They need to create a reduncancy capability, for emergencies such as this, that can quickly be switched over to prevent long outages ehen these types of catastrophic failures occur.”

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Evidently several of Cyrus One’s data center customers were impacted, not just CME. That said, your point is spot on. CME’s contract with Cyrus One should have had assurances of redundancy to guarantee against such outages or degraded services.

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