- CME data center cooling outage disrupted most electronic trading systems worldwide
- BrokerTec US Actives and BrokerTec EU reopened quickly; others remained offline
- Temporary chillers were deployed to maintain minimal operations during the outage response.
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), the world’s largest derivatives exchange, was forced to suspend trading on several markets due to a cooling outage at its CyrusOne data center.
The company says a cooling plant malfunction affected multiple cooling units, causing most of its electronic trading systems to shut down immediately.
BrokerTec US Actives and BrokerTec EU, which manage liquid US Treasury securities and European government bonds respectively, were quickly reopened, but all other systems remained offline.
Technical response and temporary measures
“Due to a cooling issue at CyrusOne data centers, our markets are currently down. Support is working to resolve the issue in the short term and will notify customers of pre-opening details as they become available,” CME said on its X account.
CME said its engineering teams, alongside specialist mechanical contractors, were working on site to restore full cooling capacity.
Several chillers were restarted with limited power and temporary cooling equipment was deployed to support the permanent systems.
The outage occurred early in the morning after a public holiday, which CME said could limit immediate disruption to U.S. markets.
However, Asian and European markets are expected to see the greatest impacts as trading systems remain unavailable.
CME operates in cities including London, Kuala Lumpur and several locations across Europe.
It facilitates trading in a wide range of products including energy, agriculture, foreign exchange, metals, cryptocurrencies and major stock indices.
Even brief disruptions can ripple through markets, creating potential disruptions in pricing and liquidity.
Automated trading systems rely on continuous availability, which makes cloud hosting environments particularly susceptible to such outages.
CME has experienced e-commerce disruptions in the past, but none of this magnitude.
Relying on a single cooling system, even in a well-designed data center, can cause serious problems for exchanges handling large financial operations.
For businesses using web hosting for trading platforms or supporting back-end operations, similar technical failures could introduce operational delays or data exposure risks.
CME has deployed temporary solutions and commercial systems are expected to return to normal operation once permanent cooling is fully restored.
However, the event serves as a reminder of the operational vulnerabilities of high-stakes financial markets.
It also shows the importance of contingency planning and redundant infrastructure for organizations managing billions of dollars in daily transactions.
Follow TechRadar on Google News And add us as your favorite source to get our news, reviews and expert opinions in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!
And of course you can too follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form and receive regular updates from us on WhatsApp Also.
