CME data center outage halts futures and options trading, impacting trillions of dollars in contracts

On November 28 (UTC+8), CME Group's futures and options trading was suspended due to a data center outage, affecting markets with trillions of dollars in contracts, including S&P 500 index futures, U.S. Treasury bonds, crude oil, gasoline, and palm oil.

Forex platform EBS resumed service at 12:00 noon London time after being down for several hours. In Singapore, oil traders said that CME is a critical component of the global market mechanism. Gerald Gan, deputy chief investment officer at Reed Capital Partners in Singapore, noted that the outage was "very annoying" and said that liquidity on alternative platforms may not be as ample as on CME.

Amelie Derambure, portfolio manager at Amundi SA, said it was fortunate that Friday was a light trading day, otherwise it would have been a "significant obstacle." The outage occurred the day after Thanksgiving, with U.S. markets only open for half a day. Emmanuel Valavanis, a London-based equity sales specialist at Forte Securities, said it was very bad that this happened on the last day of the month and year-end trading, affecting trillions of dollars in trading.

The outage has exceeded the hours-long downtime caused by a technical error in 2019.

[MarsBit]