Cooling System Failure at CyrusOne Data Center Halts Global Futures Trading on CME Group November 28, 2025 A critical cooling system failure at a major data center has forced CME Group, the world's largest derivatives exchange operator, to halt trading across its global futures markets, underscoring the profound vulnerability of the financial system to physical infrastructure disruptions. The incident highlights how even a single point of failure in mission-critical data center operations can ripple through global capital markets, impacting trillions of dollars in daily transactions. The trading halt was triggered by a chiller plant failure at CyrusOne's CHI1 data center facility in the Chicago area on November 27. CME Group, which houses critical trading infrastructure at the site, was forced to suspend all futures trading. In a statement posted to its website, CME confirmed, "Due to a cooling issue at CyrusOne data centers, our markets are currently halted." The outage affected the pricing and trading of benchmark products including West Texas Intermediate crude oil, 10-year US Treasuries, the S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, Nikkei, palm oil, and gold. The affected CyrusOne campus, which spans 450,000 square feet with 109MW of IT capacity, was originally sold to the colocation provider by CME Group in a 2016 sale-leaseback deal. CyrusOne, which operates approximately 55 data centers worldwide, stated that engineering teams and contractors were working around the clock to restore full cooling capacity, having deployed temporary equipment and restarted several chillers at limited capacity. Christopher Forbes, head of Asia and Middle East at CMC Markets, told Reuters the widespread nature of the outage was unprecedented in his two decades of experience, noting, "We're now taking a lot of unnecessary risk here to continue pricing. My guess is the market is not going to like this, I think it will be a bit volatile on the open." The disruption raises urgent questions for the financial industry regarding infrastructure resilience and redundancy strategies. While CME Group has a long-term agreement to migrate its IT infrastructure to Google Cloud over the next decade and also utilizes Equinix facilities, this incident demonstrates the immediate risks posed by reliance on specific physical locations. For the global data center industry, the event serves as a stark reminder of the operational and reputational consequences of cooling system failures, likely accelerating investments in fault-tolerant designs, predictive maintenance, and more diversified disaster recovery plans for financial clients. Source: datacenterdynamics
Cooling System Failure at CyrusOne Data Center Halts Global Futures Trading on CME Group
