December 8, 2025 A significant data center outage that halted futures trading for CME Group, one of the world's largest derivatives exchanges, has been attributed to human error, highlighting the critical importance of operational procedures in mission-critical infrastructure. The incident occurred on November 28 at the CH1 data center in Aurora, Illinois, operated by colocation provider CyrusOne. According to a report citing a company spokesperson, onsite staff and contractors failed to follow standard procedure while draining cooling towers in anticipation of freezing temperatures. This procedural failure led to a chiller plant failure affecting multiple cooling units, triggering an outage that lasted approximately 11 hours. The disruption prevented traders from accessing benchmark futures prices for a wide range of commodities, equities, metals, energy products, and cryptocurrencies. The affected facility, a 450,000-square-foot campus with an IT capacity of 109 megawatts, was originally built and operated by CME before being sold to CyrusOne in a $130 million sale-leaseback deal in 2016. CyrusOne, jointly owned by private equity firms KKR & Co. and Global Infrastructure Partners, stated it has since added "additional redundancy to the cooling systems" in response to the failure. This event underscores the profound financial and operational risks associated with even minor procedural lapses in data center management. For global financial markets reliant on the continuous operation of such infrastructure, the incident serves as a stark reminder of the need for rigorous training, oversight, and adherence to established protocols to prevent costly service disruptions. Source: datacenterdynamics
Human Error Blamed for Major CME Group Data Center Outage, Disrupting Futures Trading
