One of modern finance’s worst nightmares briefly came to life: the electronic heart of the futures market stopped beating.
The problem started the previous evening at a CyrusOne data center in Aurora, Illinois, which hosts critical infrastructure for CME Group and other trading platforms. A failure in the chiller plant knocked multiple cooling units offline, allowing temperatures in parts of the facility to climb to around 120°F (nearly 49°C). To protect hardware, systems were shut down—taking much of CME’s Globex network with them.
As the outage unfolded, trading in benchmark contracts tied to U.S. stock indexes, Treasuries, West Texas Intermediate crude, gold, Nikkei futures, palm oil and major currency pairs all stalled. In Asia and Europe, traders initially assumed there was a local connectivity issue—until it became clear that the exchange itself had gone dark. Some reported being unable to hedge positions or manage risk during the blackout, though the holiday-thinned volumes limited the broader economic impact.
CME eventually rerouted operations and brought markets back online, announcing that most products had resumed trading by mid-morning U.S. time. Still, this was the longest such disruption since previous outages in 2014 and 2019, and it arrived at a moment when regulators have been warning about concentration risk in exchanges and clearinghouses.
The incident also highlights a broader vulnerability: as data centers grow more power-dense to handle AI and high-frequency workloads, cooling systems become a single point of failure. Analysts now expect tougher questions from regulators about redundancy, failover procedures and whether mission-critical markets should be so dependent on one site.