(Investors Business Daily) - An already abridged bond and stock market trading session was hit with early issues Friday morning as Chicago Mercantile Exchange trading halted due to a data center cooling issue.
U.S. stock markets are due to close at 1 p.m. ET with bond markets closing at 2 p.m. ET. However, The CME — the globe's largest exchange operator by market value — which trades commodities and equities futures and options was down early Friday.
CME services appeared to be slowly returning to U.S. markets after 7 a.m. ET, but some futures trading was still down. Stock and options trading service resumed around 8:30 a.m. ET, according to CME Group (CME) after being halted for more than 10 hours.
The issue did not appear to affect the New York Stock Exchange or the Nasdaq. On an average trading day, CME Group processes around $1.5 trillion worth of futures and options trades, according to CME's website.
"Due to a cooling issue at CyrusOne data centers, our markets are currently halted," CME sent out in emailed statements to the press early Friday. "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."
Contracts tied to major indexes including the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 stopped trading shortly before 10 p.m. Thursday, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Sources told CNBC early Friday that traders in the Asian and European session were likely to be more affected than those in the U.S.
CME Outage And Meme Stock Interest
Reflecting the retail and meme stock investor interest, CME Group (CME) stock was the top top-tracked subject by the subreddit investor group r/WallStreetBets.
Website ApeWisdom showed interest in CME Group soared, overtaking Nvidia (NVDA) as the top trending issue on r/WallStreetBets as of Friday morning.
However, CME stock was little changed before Friday's stock market action, edging down a fraction.
The CME outage Friday is the latest example of financial systems coming to a standstill due to technical failures.
Stock and financial markets were disrupted in July, 2024, when a faulty update by CrowdStrike caused 8.5 million computer systems to crash.
A software malfunction halted trading for almost four hours on the NYSE in July, 2015. The Nasdaq halted trading for three-hours on Aug. 22, 2013 after an electronic system failure.
By Kit Norton
November 28, 2025
