CME Group suffered a rare, market-wide outage on Friday morning after a cooling failure at a CyrusOne data centre forced the exchange operator to halt trading across futures, options, FX and several benchmark contracts.
CME Suffers Trading Outage as Data Centre Failure Prompts Blackout
28 November 2025 - 11:35 CET
By Matt Neill
The disruption hit during the US Thanksgiving holiday, when liquidity is thin and automated order books are typically sparse, limiting the immediate market impact but raising concerns about potential volatility when trading resumes.
S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, and Treasury futures stopped updating for hours, freezing key reference prices used by global desks, while the EBS FX platform also went dark.
Stress Test for Liquidity
CME has spent the past year positioning itself as the institutional venue of choice for crypto exposure, and the exchange recently reported record digital-asset futures activity, with October’s average daily volume reaching 26.3 million contracts. It also plans to launch spot-quoted XRP and Solana futures next month.
The outage is unlikely to dent long-term momentum, but it highlights how dependent both TradFi and crypto markets remain on a handful of critical infrastructure nodes.
With US markets operating a shortened session on Friday and many traders still away, the restart could see sharp price dislocations if thin holiday order books collide with pent-up hedging flows across equity, rates and crypto futures.
