Global futures reopen after exchange operator CME hit by hours-long outage

SINGAPORE/LONDON: Global futures markets were thrown into chaos for several hours on Friday after CME Group, the world’s largest exchange operator, suffered one of its longest outages in years, halting trading across stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies.

By 1335 GMT, trading in foreign exchange, stock and bond futures , as well as other products had resumed, after having been knocked out for over 11 hours, according to LSEG data.

CME blamed the outage on a cooling failure at data centres run by CyrusOne, which said its Chicago-area facility had affected services for customers including CME.

The disruption stopped trading in major currency pairs on CME’s EBS platform, as well as benchmark futures for West Texas Intermediate crude, Nasdaq 100, Nikkei, palm oil and gold, according to LSEG data.

Trading volumes have been thinned out this week by the US Thanksgiving holiday and with dealers looking to close positions for the end of the month, there was a risk of volatility picking up sharply later on, market participants said.

“It’s a black eye to the CME and probably an overdue reminder of the importance of market structure and how interconnected all these are,” said Ben Laidler, head of equity strategy at Bradesco BBI.

Futures are a mainstay of financial markets and are used by dealers, speculators and businesses wishing to hedge or hold positions in a wide range of underlying assets. Without these and other instruments, brokers were left flying blind and many were reluctant to trade contracts with no live prices for hours on end.

A few European brokerages said earlier in the day they had been unable to offer trading in some products on certain futures contracts.