- A cooling failure at CyrusOne’s CHI1 Chicago data center knocked CME’s Globex and EBS systems offline on Nov. 28, 2025, halting trading across FX, commodities, rates and equity index futures.
- The disruption froze prices in major benchmarks and lasted roughly 10–11 hours for many contracts before a phased restart, with EBS returning first and broader markets later.
- The outage exposed infrastructure single-point risk and raised concerns about hedging gaps and volatility after reopening, especially around thin holiday and month-end liquidity.
- Regulators and market participants are expected to press CME on redundancy, failover procedures and incident transparency.
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On November 28, 2025, around 0240 GMT, CME Group began experiencing a technical outage caused by a cooling failure at CyrusOne’s CHI1 data center near Chicago. This affected multiple “chiller plant” units, disabling necessary cooling systems. As a result, major electronic trading systems—primarily the Globex platform and the EBS FX venue—were halted.
The outage froze price updates across major benchmarks including WTI crude oil, gold, 10-year U.S. Treasury futures, and equity index futures. Some FX pairs (EUR/USD, USD/JPY) ceased updating. EBS FX, which sees nearly $60 billion in daily volume, was among the platforms impacted.
Restoration was phased: EBS FX reopened around 12:00 GMT. Full resumption across CME’s futures, options, commodities markets followed, with main platforms back by early morning ET (approximately 7:30 AM local). The total downtime for many affected benchmarks exceeded 10–11 hours.
Strategically, this event highlights that even leading exchanges are vulnerable to single‐point failures in their infrastructure. Timing (post-Thanksgiving, month-end) exacerbated effects though also mitigated exposure due to lower volumes. Still, risk of mispriced positions, inability to hedge, and pent-up demand when markets reopened present hazards for price volatility.
Going forward, market participants must assess operational risk not just from market‐driven events but from physical and technical infrastructure. Exchanges like CME may face regulatory pressure to increase redundancy, provide faster failover protocols, and disclose more transparent incident reporting. For firms and traders, this suggests re-evaluating exposure in periods of thin liquidity and ensuring fallback or alternative sources for price discovery and hedging.
Open questions remain: exact failure points (how many chillers failed, why temporary cooling was insufficient), risk containment (how CME rerouted orders during the outage), and whether clients suffered losses that might trigger litigation or regulatory examination. Also, how will exchanges mitigate similar risks in future—data center diversity, backup sites, or increased capacity at edge locations? These will be central in the post‐incident analysis.
Supporting Notes
- Outage initiated by a cooling failure at CyrusOne’s CHI1 data center, which experienced a chiller plant failure affecting multiple cooling units.
- Trading halted across FX (EBS platform), commodities (oil, gold, palm oil), bonds (U.S. Treasuries), and equity index futures (S&P 500, Nasdaq-100, Nikkei) among others.
- EBS FX platform resumed around 12:00 GMT, while other markets including Globex recovered fully by approximately 7:30 AM Central Time.
- The duration of the outage for many contracts was over 10 hours, making it one of CME’s longest in recent history; comparable past outage was in 2019.
- Average daily derivative volume for CME reached 26.3 million contracts in October 2025, highlighting scale of affected operations.
- Regulators including the CFTC and SEC are monitoring the incident, which has raised broader concerns about reliance on single infrastructure nodes.