CME Exchange Outage Disrupts FX, Futures, and Treasury Markets on Black Friday

Black Friday opened with unexpected turbulence in global markets as a significant outage at CME Group (CME)—the world’s largest exchange operator—halted trading across FX markets, U.S. Treasury futures, and equity and commodity futures.

The disruption followed Thursday’s holiday closure, catching traders off guard in what is usually a lighter-volume session.

Cause of the Outage

CME stated that the disruption was triggered by a “cooling issue at CyrusOne data centers,” according to a brief message posted at 02:40 am GMT.
The exchange said it is working to “resolve issues in the near term.”

Current Status (as of CME’s update)

BrokerTec US Actives: Open
BrokerTec EU: Open
Other CME markets: Still halted

Background: CME’s Dependence on CyrusOne

CME’s electronic trading platform has been hosted at CyrusOne’s Aurora, Illinois, data center since CME sold the campus to the operator in 2016.
CyrusOne has not yet issued a statement on the outage.
The data center recently drew local attention due to noise complaints about its chillers, per the Chicago Tribune.

Market Impact

The outage hit some of the most critical global markets:

FX trading halted
Treasury futures (including 10Y futures) disrupted
Futures on major U.S. indices such as the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 affected
Commodity futures also interrupted

CME handled a record 26.3 million average daily contracts in October, underscoring the scale of the disruption.

Why This Matters

CME is one of the world’s primary liquidity hubs. Any outage—especially during active macro trading periods—has ripple effects across:

Currency markets
Global bond trading
Index futures
Commodity hedging and risk management

The incident highlights ongoing concerns about the resilience and redundancy of data-center infrastructure supporting global financial markets.