The platform suspends trading across futures and FTX products. This occurred following cooling issues at 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 halt on Friday after its CyrusOne data center overheated and major services and platforms went offline. It was confirmed in today’s official X post:
Our market is currently suspended due to cooling issues in the CyrusOne data center.
Futures trading related to currencies, stock indexes, government bonds and commodities stopped updating, live price feeds were shut down, traders were unable to get reliable prices as brokers lacked data to quote the market, and regular market trading became chaotic.
Notably, the first alert appeared on CME’s platform at 2:40 a.m. GMT, notifying users of the outage on multiple platforms.
Meanwhile, major stocks such as the Nikkei Stock Average, S&P 500 Index, and Nasdaq 100 Index failed to update for several hours in early Asian trading.
There were also problems on the currency front, as CME’s EBS platform went down and major pairs such as USD/JPY and EUR/USD went offline.
The incident caught the attention of the crypto community as it occurred days after the Chicago Mercantile Exchange announced that its crypto options and futures suite had reached a new ATH in daily volume.
Broker stuck due to price feed outage
This event took live pricing offline, leaving brokers to navigate the market without essential functionality.
Some companies halted trading activities, while others switched to internal models or backup sources.
Christopher Forbes, head of CME’s Middle East and Asia division, said he had never seen an incident like this in 20 years and called it “heartbreaking.”
At this time, the platform is committed to maintaining stable pricing using alternative feeds, which may lead to incorrect pricing in volatile situations. Forbes magazine says:
We’re currently taking a lot of unnecessary risks here to keep pricing going. My guess is the market won’t like this. I think it will be a little unstable in the open.
Meanwhile, the disruption occurred as market activity slowed due to the Thanksgiving holiday.
Timing increases uncertainty
CME’s outage comes at a troubling time for the trading platform.
Four days ago, on November 24, the team celebrated a significant progress as the crypto derivatives complex hit a record high in 24-hour trading volume, marking new momentum for digital currencies.
Commenting on this milestone, Giovanni Vicioso, Global Head of Crypto Products at CME Group, said:
As market uncertainty continues, demand for highly liquid and regulated crypto risk management tools is accelerating. Customers around the world continue to turn to our benchmark crypto futures and options to hedge risk and pursue opportunities in this complex environment, with both large institutions and retail traders driving record activity across our product suite.
Today, November 28th, the story is much different.
Rather than celebrating increased activity, exchange operators are fighting to answer questions about the resilience of their infrastructure.
For now, the main derivatives engine remains offline, not because of financial challenges but because of overheated data centers that typically operate quietly in the background.
