SINGAPORE – An outage at the world’s biggest exchange operator, CME Group has halted trade on its popular currency platform and in futures spanning foreign exchange, commodities, Treasuries and stocks, freezing a handful of benchmarks as brokers pulled products.
The problem was a cooling issue at CyrusOne data centres, said CME in a statement, adding it was working to resolve it in the “near term” but offering no further details.
CyrusOne, which is headquartered in Dallas and operates more than 55 data centres in the U.S., Europe and Japan, did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
CME is the world’s biggest exchange operator by market value and says it offers the widest range of benchmark products, spanning rates, equities, metals, energy, cryptocurrencies and agriculture. It first posted about outages at 0240 GMT on its website.
Futures prices for West Texas Intermediate crude, 10-year U.S Treasuries, the S&P 500, Nasdaq 100 , Nikkei, palm oil and gold were among those not updated by 0720 GMT on Friday, according to LSEG Data.
Prices were also not updated on the EBS foreign exchange platform, which traded an average of almost $60 billion daily in October, in major pairs such as euro/dollar and dollar/yen.
While spot forex traders were more easily able to find other venues to execute deals, the outages left brokers flying blind and many reluctant to trade contracts with no live prices.
“It’s just a pain in the arse, to be honest,” said CMC Markets’ head of Asia and Middle East, Christopher Forbes, who said he had never seen such a widespread exchange outage in 20 years.
CMC had pulled trade in a number of commodity contracts and in other products it had either switched its source or was relying on its own internal data and calculations to make prices for clients and even other brokers.
“We’re now taking a lot of unnecessary risk here to continue pricing,” said Forbes. “My guess is the market is not going to like this, I think it will be a bit volatile on the open.”
Futures are a mainstay of financial markets and used by dealers, speculators and businesses wishing to hedge or hold positions in a wide range of underlying assets.
Average daily derivatives volume was 26.3 million contracts in October, CME said earlier this month.
The outage at CME on Friday comes more than a decade after the operator had to shut electronic trade for some agricultural contracts in April 2014 due to technical problems, which at the time sent traders back on to the floor.
More recently in 2024 outages at LSEG and Switzerland’s exchange operator briefly interrupted markets.
“It’s been a very slow day here in Asia after the Thanksgiving holiday and this hasn’t helped at all, more so given there is interest to transact at the end of what has been a volatile month,” said Tony Sycamore, market analyst at IG.
With the U.S. markets on holiday for Thanksgiving on Thursday and expected to open for a short session on Friday, trading volumes were expected to be low.
(Reporting by Ankur Banerjee, Tom Westbrook, Rae Wee and Florence Tan in Singapore; Editing by Christian Schmollinger, Shri Navaratnam and Thomas Derpinghaus)