- The platform suspends trading between futures and FTX products.
- This was caused by a cooling issue in the CyrusOne data center.
- The disruption comes days after CME celebrated a record day for the cryptocurrency complex.
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange implemented an unexpected trading pause on Friday after a CyrusOne data center overheated, knocking key services and platforms offline. Today’s official X post has been confirmed:
Cooling issues in the CyrusOne data center are currently causing the market to shut down.
Routine market sessions were thrown into disarray as futures linked to currencies, stock indices, Treasury bonds and commodities lost updates, real-time price feeds were disrupted and brokers lacked data to quote the markets, preventing traders from getting reliable prices.
Notably, an initial alert appeared on the CME platform at 02:40 GMT, informing users of an outage on multiple platforms.
Meanwhile, major contracts including the Nikkei, S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 had not been updated for several hours since the early Asian session.
Additionally, on the currency side, issues arose with CME’s EBS platform being taken offline, with key pairs such as USD/JPY and EUR/USD taken offline.
The incident caught the attention of the cryptocurrency community just days after the Chicago Mercantile Exchange announced that its cryptocurrency options and futures suite had reached a new ATH in daily trading volume.
Brokers are stranded as price supply breaks
This event took real-time pricing offline, leaving brokers navigating the market without critical functionality.
Some have suspended trading activities, while others have turned to internal models or backup sources.
Christopher Forbes, CME’s head of Middle East and Asia, said he had not seen an event like this in 20 years and called it a “butt.”
The platform currently strives to maintain stable prices through the use of alternative feeds, which may result in mispricing in volatile situations. Forbes said:
We are now taking a lot of unnecessary risks just to continue pricing. I don’t think the market will like this. I think I might be a bit nervous in public.
Meanwhile, the Thanksgiving holiday slowed market activity and caused power outages.
Timing adds to uncertainty
CME’s outage comes at a troubling time for the trading platform.
Four days ago, on November 24, the team celebrated a major breakthrough, signaling new momentum for the digital currency as the cryptocurrency derivatives complex hit an all-time high in 24-hour trading volume.
Giovanni Vicioso, Global Head of Crypto Products at CME Group, commented on this milestone:
Demand for liquid, regulated cryptocurrency risk management tools is accelerating amid ongoing market uncertainty. Clients around the world continue to seek out benchmark cryptocurrency futures and options to hedge risk and pursue opportunities in a complex environment where large institutional and retail traders are driving record activity across our product portfolio.
Today, November 28th, the story has changed significantly.
Rather than celebrating the increase in activity, exchange operators are trying to answer questions about the resilience of their infrastructure.
Currently, major derivatives engines remain offline, not due to financial concerns, but usually due to overheated data centers running quietly in the background.