CME Outage Freezes Key Global Benchmarks as Cooling Failure Halts Futures Trading

CME halted major futures and FX trading after a cooling failure stopped Globex price feeds.

Brokers reduced exposure and relied on internal pricing as key benchmarks went offline.

CME expects to launch new Solana and XRP futures on December 15, pending approval.

The world's biggest exchange operator, CME Group, has halted trading across its leading futures and foreign-exchange platforms after a cooling malfunction disrupted operations at the CyrusOne data centre supporting its systems.

Massive Outage Stalls Key Benchmarks Across Markets

According to Reuters on Friday, the disruption triggered a widespread freeze on CME’s Globex platform, blocking price updates for core benchmarks, including the S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, key Treasury contracts, and major currency pairs.

Market participants received the halt notice shortly before 0300 GMT. Moreover, the stoppage also extended to the EBS foreign-exchange venue, where nearly $60 billion in spot FX trades were conducted daily in October, primarily in major pairs such as the euro/dollar and dollar/yen.

CMC Markets’ head of Asia and the Middle East, Christopher Forbes, described the conditions as unprecedented in his two decades in the industry. The firm suspended several commodity products and relied on internal calculations to offer provisional pricing. Forbes warned that the absence of verified market data raised operational risks and could generate sharp swings once markets reopened.

Derivative Volumes at Risk as Brokers Limit Exposure

CME’s futures contracts support global hedging and risk-management strategies. The operator reported an average daily derivatives volume of 26.3 million contracts in October.

Moreover, CME reported that technicians are working to resolve the issue in the near future and will submit clients with fresh Pre-Open information as soon as it becomes available.

Furthermore, IG market analyst Tony Sycamore noted that activity in Asia was muted due to the Thanksgiving holiday, and the interruption further slowed market momentum.

Strong Volumes Offset System Outage

The outage came shortly after the announcement of two additional spot-quoted XRP and Solana futures contracts at CME Group. These contracts will be launched on December 15, following regulatory acceptance.

The contracts aim to provide institutions with more flexible hedging instruments and reduced margin requirements. CME also affirmed that it would introduce options associated with the new products.

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