CME Group outage freezes global markets for a day
On Friday, a cooling failure at a CyrusOne data center forced the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) Group to pause trading on some of the world's biggest financial products—think S&P 500, Dow Jones, and Nasdaq 100 futures.
This unexpected tech glitch sent ripples through stocks, commodities, bonds, and currency markets everywhere.
Why does this matter?
With millions of contracts suddenly frozen—including US Treasury futures and gold—traders scrambled to other platforms.
That made prices jumpier than usual and complicated things for anyone trying to manage risk, especially with about $600 billion in options set to expire that day.
The outage lasted longer than CME's last big tech hiccup in 2019 and really showed how much global finance relies on these digital systems—sometimes more than we realize.