Business & Economics
CME’s 11-Hour Cooling Failure Freezes Global Futures Trading
On 28 Nov 2025 a cooling-system breakdown at CyrusOne’s Chicago data centre forced CME Group to halt its Globex platform for roughly 11 hours, resuming trade at 13:35 GMT.
Focusing Facts
- Price feeds and order routing stopped for contracts representing about US$1 trillion in daily notional value on the E-mini S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 futures alone.
- Globex handles ~90 % of CME volume, with October 2025 averaging 26.3 million derivative contracts per day across rates, equities, energy and more.
- Outage exceeded CME’s prior major stoppage in April 2014, making it the exchange’s longest disruption in over a decade.
Context
Electronic exchanges have suffered technical breaks before—NYSE’s 3-hour halt on 8 July 2015 or Japan’s TSE all-day outage on 1 Oct 2020—but a full-scale freeze of the world’s biggest derivatives venue during live trading recalls the 1969 paper-work “back-office crisis” when markets choked on volume. Today’s vulnerability is digital, yet the systemic risk is similar: a single chokepoint can paralyse price discovery across asset classes. The incident underscores two structural trends: markets’ near-total dependence on a handful of data centres, and rising concentration of liquidity in a few mega-exchanges. Over a century horizon, moments like this test whether market plumbing keeps pace with financial complexity; failures push regulators and operators toward decentralised architectures, much as the 1970s led to electronic clearinghouses. If such resilience is not built, future outages—especially on high-volume days—could morph from embarrassments into shocks that reshape how global capital is routed.
Perspectives
Mainstream business media
e.g., Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance, Devdiscourse — They frame the 11-hour CME outage as a manageable technology hiccup that briefly rattled, but ultimately did not endanger, overall market functioning, noting that trading resumed on a thin post-holiday session and that shares held steady. Because these outlets cater to institutional investors and depend on exchange data feeds, they have an incentive to reassure audiences and may therefore downplay systemic risk and long-term regulatory questions raised by the failure.
International and regional general-interest news outlets
e.g., The Indian Express, News24 — They characterise the disruption as chaotic and a "black eye" for the world’s biggest futures exchange, stressing that brokers were ‘flying blind’ and warning of heightened month-end volatility. In chasing global readership and dramatic headlines, these publications may accentuate the sense of turmoil while giving less space to context about the low-volume holiday trading day that limited knock-on damage.
Crypto- and alternative-finance-focused outlets
e.g., CryptoDaily, Independent Sentinel — They spotlight the outage as proof of the fragility of centralised market infrastructure, underscoring cooling-system failures, widened spreads and traders’ frustration to argue that traditional exchanges are vulnerable. These platforms often promote decentralised assets or alternative hedges, so highlighting CME’s shortcomings can implicitly advance their own investment narratives and may overstate the comparative security of crypto or precious-metal markets.