A major outage at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange brought futures and options trading to a standstill on Friday, disrupting activity across global equity, currency, bond, and commodity markets.
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) began to restore trading on Friday after a technical issue disrupted operations on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500, and Nasdaq.
The shutdown was triggered by a cooling system failure at a data centre in the Chicago area, according to the facility’s operator, CyrusOne.
Engineering teams have since restarted several chillers and installed temporary cooling equipment to stabilise conditions, a spokesperson told Bloomberg.
According to CME Group's indications, trading in US equity futures should be restarting soon after a glitch knocked it out for several hours.
The CME, one of the world’s largest derivatives exchanges, hosts near-continuous trading in millions of contracts tied to the S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average, and Nasdaq 100. Friday’s interruption left traders grappling with uncertainty as they awaited the restoration of the platforms that underpin much of global futures activity.
The outage halted trading of US Treasury futures, while European and UK bond markets that trade on a different exchange were reported unaffected.
Futures in individual stocks were not affected, either. Coinbase Global rose 2.6% in pre-market trading as Bitcoin stayed above $91,000.
Wall Street is operating on an abbreviated schedule on Friday after being closed for the Thanksgiving holiday. Stock trading will close at 1pm Eastern Time (7pm CET).
In European trading, Germany's DAX rose 0.20% after the release of fresh inflation data.
Britain's FTSE 100 edged up 0.23% on gains in energy and mining stocks. The CAC 40 in France rose 0.19%.
In other dealings, Brent crude, the international standard for pricing, rose 0.13% to $62.62 per barrel.
