Cooling System Failure at CyrusOne Data Center Halts Global CME Group Futures Trading November 28, 2025 A critical cooling system failure at a major data center has underscored the profound vulnerability of global financial markets to physical infrastructure disruptions, after it forced the world's largest derivatives exchange operator to halt trading. CME Group was compelled to suspend all futures and options trading on November 28 following a chiller plant failure at the CHI1 data center facility in the Chicago area, operated by colocation provider CyrusOne. The outage, which began on November 27, impacted a wide range of benchmark products, leaving prices frozen for key assets including West Texas Intermediate crude oil, 10-year US Treasury notes, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 indices, gold, and agricultural commodities like palm oil. In a statement posted to its website, CME Group confirmed the market halt was "due to a cooling issue at CyrusOne data centers." The exchange, which provides a critical pricing and risk management platform for traders globally, stated its support teams were working to resolve the issue. CyrusOne, which operates approximately 55 data centers worldwide, later provided details, noting the failure affected multiple cooling units at its 450,000-square-foot Aurora, Illinois campus—a facility CME sold to the provider in a 2016 sale-leaseback deal. The company reported deploying temporary cooling equipment and working with specialized contractors to restore operations. The scale of the disruption was significant. Christopher Forbes, head of Asia and the Middle East at CMC Markets, told Reuters he had not witnessed such a widespread exchange outage in two decades. "We're now taking a lot of unnecessary risk here to continue pricing," Forbes said, predicting volatile market conditions upon reopening. The incident highlights the complex interdependencies within modern financial infrastructure, where major institutions like CME Group rely on third-party data center providers. While CME has a long-term agreement to migrate its infrastructure to Google Cloud over the next decade, this outage originated in its legacy physical footprint. For the data center industry, the event serves as a stark reminder of the mission-critical nature of cooling systems, where a single mechanical failure can cascade into a global financial market event, triggering urgent reviews of redundancy and maintenance protocols for hyperscale and financial sector clients. Source: datacenterdynamics
Cooling System Failure at CyrusOne Data Center Halts Global CME Group Futures Trading
