CME Group was forced to halt futures trading today after a cooling issue at one of its data centers.

As reported by Reuters, the exchange operator was forced to halt trading for several markets.

CME posted a statement to its website explaining the problem: "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 is the world's biggest exchange operator, and provides a range of benchmark products spanning rates, equities, metals, energy, cryptocurrencies, and agriculture for traders. The outage is ongoing and future prices for a number of stocks have not been updated, including West Texas Intermediate crude, 10-year US Treasuries, the S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, Nikkei, palm oil, and gold.

CMC Markets' head of Asia and Middle East, Christopher Forbes, told Reuters that he hadn't seen such a widespread outage in 20 years. "We're now taking a lot of unnecessary risk here to continue pricing," said Forbes. "My guess is the market is not going to like this, I think it will be a bit volatile on the open."

CyrusOne operates some 55 data centers globally. While the data center in question has not been named, in 2016, CME Group sold its data center in Aurora, Illinois, to CyrusOne under a 15-year sale-leaseback deal. Today, the Aurora campus spans three data centers with a total of 450,000 sq ft (41,806 sqm) and 109MW of IT capacity, with the company having repeatedly expanded it.

DCD has contacted CyrusOne for further information about the outage.

Update -

A CyrusOne spokesperson told DCD via email: "CyrusOne is actively responding to a cooling system issue at our CHI1 data center facility in the Chicago area that has impacted service for certain customers, including CME Group. On November 27,  our CHI1 facility experienced a chiller plant failure affecting multiple cooling units. Our engineering teams, along with specialized mechanical contractors, are on-site working to restore full cooling capacity. We have successfully restarted several chillers at limited capacity and have deployed temporary cooling equipment to supplement our permanent systems.

"We are in direct communication with all affected customers and are providing regular updates as the situation progresses. Our teams are working around the clock to restore normal operations as quickly and safely as possible. The health and stability of our customers' critical infrastructure remains our top priority. We are committed to resolving this incident and will continue to provide transparent updates to our customers and stakeholders. We apologize for any disruption this has caused and appreciate the patience of our customers as we work toward full resolution."

Original story resumes -

In 2021, CME signed an agreement with Google Cloud, which saw Google investing $1bn in the exchange, and CME set to move its IT infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform over the following decade. The exchange is also a customer of Equinix data centers.