Global markets "flying blind"! CME halted for several hours due to "cooling issues," causing a sharp drop in liquidity and triggering anger among traders

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) experienced a global trading interruption late Thursday night due to a cooling system failure at its data center, causing multiple key markets, including stocks, foreign exchange, U.S. Treasuries, energy, and agricultural products, to come to a standstill, resulting in a sharp decline in global market liquidity.

The failure originated from an abnormal cooling system at the CyrusOne-operated data center in Chicago, forcing the CME's Globex electronic trading platform to suspend all operations, which also affected related exchanges such as CBOT, NYMEX, and COMEX, and even had a cascading impact on the Gulf Commodity Exchange.

Traders described the market as being in a state of "blind flying," with liquidity evaporating instantly and the price discovery mechanism coming to a halt. Thomas Helaine, head of equity sales at TP ICAP Europe in Paris, pointed out: "U.S. futures were an important barometer before the cash stock market opened, and now losing this guidance, the market is like flying in the dark."

This failure occurred during a shortened trading session after Thanksgiving, coinciding with a critical window for monthly contract rollovers, further amplifying the difficulty of market operations and risk exposure. Analysts stated that this incident once again highlights the systemic vulnerability of global financial infrastructure in the face of a single point of failure.

Downtime Exceeds Similar Failures in 2019

CME first confirmed via social media late Thursday night that all market trading was suspended due to "cooling issues" at the CyrusOne data center, and provided an update at 5 a.m. Eastern Time stating that trading on the BrokerTec EU market had resumed, but all other CME Group markets remained halted.

After several hours of interruption, CME announced that the Globex futures and options market would resume trading at 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time on Friday. The duration of this interruption exceeded that of a similar system failure in 2019.

Traders Forced to Seek Alternative Sources of Liquidity

In the face of the sudden trading interruption, market participants were forced to urgently adjust their strategies. Nick Twidale, chief analyst at AT Global Markets in Sydney, pointed out that traders are turning to alternative liquidity tools and warned that "losing this primary source of liquidity will exacerbate market volatility risks during significant events."

Gnanasekar Thiagarajan, head of trading and hedging strategies at Kaleesuwari Intercontinental, stated: "Traders holding positions are definitely quite angry." This failure occurred at a critical point for monthly contract rollovers, leading to many positions being frozen.

Although stock markets in Europe, the U.S., and Asia performed relatively steadily during the shortened trading day after Thanksgiving, this incident still underscores CME's core position as a global financial infrastructure, where a single data center's cooling issue is sufficient to trigger cross-market ripple effects