Live trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) came to an abrupt halt on Friday after a major technical outage froze multiple markets, including CME Globex Futures & Options, EBS Direct, EBS Markets, and BMD.
While CME initially cited a “technical issue,” the actual cause has now been revealed.
According to a Bloomberg report, a Singapore-based spokesperson for CME Group confirmed that the outage was triggered by a cooling system failure at CyrusOne data centers, where CME’s critical infrastructure is hosted.
“Due to a cooling issue at CyrusOne data centers, our markets are currently halted,” the spokesperson told Bloomberg. “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.”
The cooling malfunction forced key servers offline, leading to a cascading halt across CME’s global trading ecosystem. The issue affected:
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CME Globex Futures & Options trading
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EBS Direct
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EBS Markets
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Bursa Malaysia Derivatives (BMD)
CME’s system-status page continues to show the outage as “under investigation,” with updates promising a coordinated restart once systems stabilize.
The timing of the halt drew attention worldwide, especially from commodities and FX traders, as gold and silver futures were approaching breakout levels when trading suddenly stopped.
Meanwhile, MCX in India remains fully operational and is not affected by CME’s infrastructure problem.
Further updates from CME Group are expected as recovery work continues.
