futures

CME blamed the outage, which halted trading for more than 11 hours, on a cooling failure at a data centre in Chicago.

Global futures markets were thrown into chaos for several hours after CME Group, the world’s largest exchange operator, suffered one of its longest outages in years, halting trading across stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies.

By 13:35 GMT on Friday, trading in foreign exchange, stock and bond futures as well as other products had resumed, after having been knocked out for more than 11 hours because of an outage at an important data centre, according to LSEG data.

CME blamed the outage on a cooling failure at data centres run by CyrusOne, which said its Chicago-area facility had affected services for customers, including CME.

The disruption stopped trading in major currency pairs on CME’s EBS platform, as well as benchmark futures for West Texas Intermediate crude, Nasdaq 100, Nikkei, palm oil and gold, according to LSEG data.

‘A black eye’

Trading volumes have been thinned out this week by the United States Thanksgiving holiday, and with dealers looking to close positions for the end of the month, there was a risk of volatility picking up sharply later on, market participants said.

“It’s a black eye to the CME and probably an overdue reminder of the importance of market structure and how interconnected all these are,” Ben Laidler, head of equity strategy at Bradesco BBI, said.

“We complacently take for granted that much of the timing is frankly not great. It’s month-end, a lot of things get rebalanced.”

“Having said that, it could have been a lot worse; it’ll be a very low-volume day. If you’re going to have it, there would have been worse days to have a breakdown like this,” he said.

Futures are a mainstay of financial markets and are used by dealers, speculators and businesses wishing to hedge or hold positions in a wide range of underlying assets. Without these and other instruments, brokers were left flying blind, and many were reluctant to trade contracts with no live prices for hours on end.

“Beyond the immediate risk of traders being unable to close positions – and the potential costs that follow – the incident raises broader concerns about reliability,” said Axel Rudolph, senior technical analyst at trading platform IG.

A few European brokerages said earlier in the day they had been unable to offer trading in some products on certain futures contracts.

Biggest exchange operator

CME is the biggest exchange operator by market value and says it offers the widest range of benchmark products, spanning rates, equities, metals, energy, cryptocurrencies and agriculture.

Average daily derivatives volume was 26.3 million contracts in October, CME said earlier this month.

The CME outage on Friday comes more than a decade after the operator had to shut electronic trading for some agricultural contracts in April 2014 due to technical problems, which at the time sent traders back onto the floor.

More recently, in 2024, outages at LSEG and Switzerland’s exchange operator briefly interrupted markets.

CME’s own shares were up 0.4 percent in premarket trading.

Manchester United head coach Ruben Amorim has not ruled out Kobbie Mainoo and Joshua Zirkzee leaving in January to further their World Cup ambitions – but says the interests of his club will come first.

Neither player has started a Premier League game this season. Zirkzee has figured for just 82 minutes in the top flight, while Mainoo has played for 93 minutes since coming on at half-time against Burnley on 30 August.

Both players are known to be unhappy about the situation and – having lost their international spots with England and the Netherlands respectively – are keen to secure January moves to get regular game time before next summer’s World Cup.

Amorim sympathises with the pair, but says he will only sanction moves if they are right for United.

“I was a football player,” he said. “I understand everything, and I want to help my players in every situation.

“I understand the frustration of some players, seeing the World Cup is there. I know what it means.

“But the first thing is that the club comes first. If I can help the club and the players, I will be happy. If not I have to think about the team.”

Both Mainoo and Zirkzee could profit from the injury to striker Benjamin Sesko and the departures of Bryan Mbeumo and Amad Diallo to the Africa Cup of Nations next month.

That is without the strange case of Matheus Cunha, who pulled out of a planned appearance to switch on the Altrincham Christmas lights on Saturday with an injury a club source described as “minor”.

United are on a five -game unbeaten run heading into Monday’s game against Everton at Old Trafford.

But United’s two most recent games were draws at Nottingham Forest and Tottenham that required late equalisers after Amorim’s side had squandered first-half leads.

For that reason, the former Sporting boss is reluctant to say the “storm” he predicted in his early days at the club has passed.

“I don’t like to say the storm is over,” he said. “It’s my job, especially in our club, to always have that feeling [that a storm is coming].

“It gives me the sense of urgency in every training [session] and, in the Premier League, everything can change so fast because all the teams can win any game.”