A technical outage at CME Group, the world's largest exchange operator, has temporarily halted trading on several major platforms, affecting popular currency markets as well as futures contracts covering foreign exchange, commodities, US Treasuries and stocks.
The situation has also frozen several major benchmarks as brokers have started withdrawing related products.
CME said the cause of the outage was a cooling system problem at the CyrusOne data center. However, further details were not disclosed, other than an assurance that recovery efforts are underway and are expected to be completed in the near future.
CyrusOne, which is based in Dallas and operates more than 55 data centers in the US, Europe and Japan, has not yet provided any official comment.
Several major futures prices failed to update, including West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil, 10-year US Treasury, S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, Nikkei, palm oil and gold, according to LSEG data.
The disruption also affected the EBS foreign exchange platform, which averaged nearly $60 billion a day in October, covering major pairs such as euro/dollar and dollar/yen.
The situation has led many brokers to refuse to continue trading contracts without real-time prices, thus increasing market volatility.
Some financial institutions have been forced to pull back trading on some commodity contracts, while other products are determined using alternative data sources or internal calculations to allow prices to continue to be offered to clients.
Futures are a mainstay of the global financial system and are widely used for hedging and risk management. CME previously reported average daily derivatives volume of 26.3 million contracts in October.
This comes as Asian market activity remains subdued after the Thanksgiving holiday, adding pressure to an already volatile trading environment, especially towards the end of the month.
