CME Group Halts Trading After Data Center Outage, Affecting Trillions in Contracts

CME Group suspended futures and options trading on November 28 due to a data center failure, affecting markets encompassing trillions of dollars in contracts including S&P 500 index futures, U.S. Treasuries, crude oil, gasoline, and palm oil, Bloomberg reports. The foreign exchange platform EBS resumed service at 12:00 p.m. London time after hours of downtime. Gerald Gan, deputy chief investment officer at Singapore's Reed Capital Partners, described the outage as "very annoying" and noted that alternative platforms may lack CME's liquidity depth. The disruption occurred the day after Thanksgiving during a half-day trading session in U.S. markets and exceeded the duration of a 2019 technical-error-related outage lasting several hours.