CME Group (NASDAQ: CME), the world’s largest derivatives exchange, suffered a catastrophic infrastructure failure on Friday, halting trading across global equities, commodities, and cryptocurrency futures.
CME Group (NASDAQ: CME), the world’s largest derivatives exchange, suffered a catastrophic infrastructure failure on Friday, halting trading across global equities, commodities, and cryptocurrency futures.
The outage, triggered by a cooling system malfunction at a CyrusOne data center, has effectively extended the U.S. Thanksgiving market closure, leaving institutional desks “flying blind” during a critical liquidity window.
“Due to a cooling issue at CyrusOne data centers, our markets are currently halted. Support is working to resolve the issue in the near term and will advise clients of Pre-Open details as soon as they are available,” CME
According to market data from TradingView, the real-time transmission of data stopped on Friday 28, 2:00 UTC. For instance, the Bitcoin CME Futures had not made any move and remained stuck at around $91,325 at the time of this writing.
According to Christopher Forbes, the head of CMC Group in Asia and the Middle East, such widespread pain among traders has not been reported in 20 years.
“It’s just a pain in the arse, to be honest,” Christopher
As such, Christopher has cautioned traders that market volatility is likely to surge after CME Group resumes its operations. Furthermore, a gap is likely to occur in major futures.
The CME Group outage is a clear indication of rising stress on data centers caused by the mainstream adoption of artificial intelligence. Earlier this week, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order called “Genesis Mission”, to bring together different departments and accelerate the research and development of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
The CME exchange has proved to be a crucial trading resource for crypto investors in the recent past. The mainstream adoption of digital assets by institutional investors has helped increase the correlation between their CME futures and spot price action,
For instance, the recent Bitcoin drop from trading above $100k to below $90k was heavily influenced by an unfilled CME gap above $92k in the daily timeframe. Several similar instances have happened on major altcoins, led by Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), and XRP.
In October, CME Group announced that its crypto futures and options Open Interest (OI) surged by 36% to hover around $352 billion. As such, it is safe to say that crypto prices discovery significantly depends on CME Futures outlook, thus making Friday’s trading halt vital for the wider digital asset industry.
