A major data center outage halted futures and options trading early Friday, leaving investors in the dark for more than 10 hours.
CME Group, a Chicago-based exchange operator, said trading had resumed mid-morning Friday in futures tied to US stock indexes, Treasurys, gold, crude oil and other major markets.
That was after a data center in Illinois, owned by the Cyrus One firm, overheated on Thursday night, sparking the longest such outage in years.
The holiday-shortened session over the Thanksgiving period means trading is tradtionally much lighter, but it left brokers flying blind as many were reluctant to trade contracts with no live prices overnight.
The cooling problem spared other exchanges like NYSE and Nasdaq, where stocks traded normally in premarket.
“It could have been a lot worse, it’ll be a very low volume day. If you’re going to have it, there would have been worse days to have a breakdown like this,” Ben Laidler, head of equity strategy at Bradesco BBI.
An oil trader in Singapore inititally dismissed an alert around 10:30 a.m. local time Friday about a market outage as a hoax because trades and quotes kept streaming in, Bloomberg reported.
Minutes later, the screen froze and the trader was kicked out of the Nymex platform, CME’s primary trading platform.
“Beyond the immediate risk of traders being unable to close positions – and the potential costs that follow – the incident raises broader concerns about reliability,” said Axel Rudolph, senior technical analyst at trading platform IG.
The timing of the technical failure reduced its impact, but some experts warned thin volumes could make price moves bigger.
The Post has approached the CME Group and Cyrus One for comment.
Traders use futures or options contracts to hedge risks or bet on market changes, pocketing the difference when they make a winning gamble.
CME handles huge volumes of trades. Its website says it processes $1.5 trillion in equity index futures and options daily, plus $9.6 trillion in notional value for interest-rate bets.
It 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.
Average daily derivatives volume was 26.3 million contracts in October, CME said earlier this month.
This is one of CME’s worst outages in years. In 2019, trading halted for hours due to technical problems. CME sold the Aurora data center to CyrusOne in 2016.
Back in 2014, technical issues also shut down some trading on the CME’s Globex electronic system, impacting agricultural contracts.
CyrusOne, a private firm, runs dozens of data centers worldwide. It was bought for about $15 billion by KKR and Global Infrastructure Partners in 2022.
CME operates major exchanges like the New York Mercantile Exchange, Chicago Board of Trade, and Comex.
It began life as the Chicago Butter and Egg Board, a historical commodities exchange that was founded in 1898 focusing on agricultural products.