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CME Trading Halted After Data Center Cooling Failure

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Written By
Christian Harris
Contributor Image
Written By
Christian Harris
Christian is an active trader with over 5 years of experience across stocks, futures, forex, and crypto. A former tech journalist, he shifted to finance to pursue his passion for investing, eventually becoming an eToro Popular Investor. With real-world trading knowledge across multiple asset classes, he brings valuable, hands-on insights to the table.
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Updated
Nov 28, 2025

A cooling failure at CyrusOne data centers has halted trading across CME Group platforms, freezing futures and options on Globex, EBS FX, and related markets like commodities, treasuries, equities, and energy.

Key Takeaways

  • The global outage occurred during a thin post-Thanksgiving Friday session.
  • Pricing is frozen or unstable in key futures (equities, treasuries, energy, commodities) and linked venues.
  • Multiple brokers have reported missing prices in several CFDs and worse liquidity/spreads in XAU/XAG.
  • Wider spreads, stale prices and potential gap volatility on reopen raise execution and hedging risks for active traders.

We’ve seen emails from multiple brokers about the outage. For example, TopFX emailed with the following warning:

Client message from TopFX about CME halting trading in November 2026

Outage Details

The issue stemmed from a chiller plant malfunction at CME’s central electronic hub in Aurora, Illinois, affecting multiple cooling units and forcing a full pause.

CME confirmed markets remain halted as support teams, alongside contractors, deploy temporary cooling and restart chillers at reduced capacity.

Contracts like WTI crude, S&P 500 futures, 10-year Treasuries, and palm oil stopped updating around 09:00 ET, with Bursa Malaysia’s derivatives also offline via CME’s platform.

Traders report stable but narrow ranges persisting at the time of writing, as Asian and European sessions absorb the brunt.

Trader Impacts

Liquidity providers, unable to hedge via CME futures, are withdrawing from spot markets, widening CFD spreads, and creating execution risks, such as slippage on market orders.

Price signals may turn unreliable, with stale futures levels misaligning with spot action and delaying actual market moves. For CFD traders, this means monitoring positions closely, favoring limits over markets, and bracing for catch-up volatility on reopen – potentially amplifying thin-session gaps into real distortions.

Even brief halts in low-liquidity windows can spike volatility across FX, treasuries, and commodities once resolved.

With CME as the derivatives powerhouse spanning CBOT, NYMEX, and Comex, these rare but recurring glitches (echoing 2014 agricultural contract halts) underscore the fragility of infrastructure in 24/7 global trading.