Global Futures Markets Resume Trading Following Multi-Hour Outage at CME Group
By Amanda Cooper, Ankur Banerjee, and Tom Westbrook | November 29, 2025
Global futures markets experienced a significant disruption on Friday, November 28, 2025, after CME Group, the world’s largest exchange operator, suffered one of its longest operational outages in recent years. The outage brought trading to a halt across a wide range of asset classes including stocks, bonds, commodities, and currencies. Trading was suspended for over 11 hours, causing concern among market participants as they faced uncertainty amidst an already thin liquidity environment.
Cause of the Outage: Cooling System Failure
CME Group traced the cause of the outage to a cooling system failure at a CyrusOne data center located in the Chicago area. CyrusOne confirmed that its facility experienced the issue, affecting several clients including CME. This technical failure led to a widespread blackout of electronic trading on critical platforms operated by CME.
Impact on Markets
During the outage, key futures contracts were unavailable for trading. Affected products included:
- Major currency pairs on CME’s EBS foreign exchange platform
- West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil futures
- Equity index futures such as Nasdaq 100 and Nikkei 225
- Commodities including palm oil and gold
The halt in trading left brokers and traders “flying blind” without live price feeds, making it difficult to manage risk or open and close positions. Some foreign exchange trading partially resumed on EBS later in the day, but widespread disruption was noted throughout the morning and early afternoon until trading resumed fully by approximately 13:35 GMT.
Market Reaction and Analysis
The incident occurred during a particularly sensitive period—near the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday when markets are typically quieter and volumes thinner. Many traders were also in the process of closing positions at month-end, which raised concerns about potential market volatility once trading recommenced.
Ben Laidler, head of equity strategy at Bradesco BBI, described the disruption as “a black eye to the CME” and a stark reminder of the complexity and interconnectivity within the global market structure. He added that the timing was “frankly not great,” but acknowledged the outage might have had a much bigger impact if it occurred on a busier trading day.
Joe Saluzzi, co-manager of Themis Trading, noted that while the outage was significant, the lighter trading session due to the holiday softened the blow, stating, “If there was to be a glitch day, today’s probably a good day to have it.”
Axel Rudolph, senior technical analyst at IG, highlighted broader concerns, cautioning that beyond immediate risks to traders, such outages call into question the reliability of critical market infrastructure.
Industry and Regulatory Response
European brokerages reported difficulties offering trades in some futures products earlier in the day due to the outage. Market participants expect firms to reassess their data center dependencies and invest more heavily to safeguard uptime and continuity.
Regulatory bodies including the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) confirmed they were monitoring the situation and conducting ongoing surveillance to understand the full implications of the outage.
CME Group’s Position and Historical Context
CME Group is the largest exchange operator globally by market value and offers the widest range of benchmark products across numerous asset classes, including derivatives on interest rates, equities, metals, energy products, cryptocurrencies, and agricultural commodities. In October alone, CME reported average daily derivatives volumes of 26.3 million contracts.
This outage marks one of the most significant technical interruptions for CME in recent history. The last comparable large-scale disruption was in April 2014, when CME was forced to halt electronic trading on certain agricultural contracts due to technical difficulties.
More recently, exchanges such as the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) and Switzerland’s SIX Swiss Exchange experienced brief outages in 2024, underscoring the vulnerabilities in market infrastructure worldwide.
Despite the disruption, CME’s shares showed resilience, rising 0.4% in premarket trading following the news.
Looking Ahead
As global financial markets have become increasingly reliant on electronic trading and real-time data feeds, failures such as this outage at CME highlight the critical importance of robust technological infrastructure and contingency planning. Market participants and regulators alike will likely push for enhanced safeguards and transparency to minimize risk and maintain trust in the integrity of these essential financial systems.
Reporting by Saqib Iqbal Ahmed, Laura Matthews, Chris Prentice, Rae Wee, Florence Tan, Lucy Raitano, Vidya Ranganathan, Alun John, Toby Sterling, and Pranav Kashyap. Editing by Alison Williams, Elaine Hardcastle, and Alistair Bell.
About CME Group:
CME Group operates some of the largest and most diverse futures and options exchanges globally, providing benchmark products across a wide range of asset classes and serving millions of market participants worldwide.
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