The floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME)/New York Mercantile Exchange (Nymex) in New York City. CME Group is the world’s largest and most diverse derivatives exchange.
David S. Holloway | Getty Images
Trading gradually resumed after coming to a standstill on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on Friday, as a cooling issue at one of its data centers impacted traders across the globe.
Stock futures and options trading reopened fully at 8:30 a.m. ET, with other services gradually being restored. Bonds and metals resumed trading after a pause, according to FactSet data, while individual stocks were still trading the premarket.
“All CME Group markets are open and trading,” a CME Group spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
Earlier, representatives for CME Group had told CNBC markets were halted due to a cooling issue at CyrusOne data centers, adding that it may take some time for moves in the impacted contracts to be seen once the outage is resolved.
Globex futures and options markets, foreign exchange platform EBS markets and BMD markets were all impacted. EBS markets reopened at 7 a.m. ET, around 90 minutes after its subsidiary BrokerTec EU markets resumed trading.
The CME — the largest exchange operator in the world by market value — trades futures and options across various asset classes, including agricultural commodities, energy, metals and equities.
Cooling issue
Earlier, a spokesperson for Dallas, Texas-headquartered CyrusOne told CNBC the company was actively responding to a cooling system issue at its CHI1 data center facility in the Chicago area, which had impacted customers including CME Group.
“On November 27, our CHI1 facility experienced a chiller plant failure affecting multiple cooling units,” they said in an email. “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.”
CyrusOne’s representative said the firm was in direct contact with all affected customers, and its teams were “working around the clock to restore normal operations as quickly and safely as possible.”
“We apologize for any disruption this has caused and appreciate the patience of our customers as we work toward full resolution,” they added.
Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth, told CNBC it was fortunate the outage had come on one of the slowest trading days of the year in the U.S., just after Thanksgiving.
“It appears as though they are gradually starting to restore some operations,” he said. “All told this could have been much worse.”
Emir Syazwan, a futures trader at Ninefold Trading Co. based in Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur, told CNBC on Friday that he had been on the phone to his broker “throughout the afternoon” local time as the CME outage dragged on.
Given the timing of the outage — at the end of the week, just after a major U.S. holiday and in the early hours of the morning for American traders — Syazwan said those trading in the Asian or European session would be more directly impacted.
Whether it will create “lasting distortions” in markets depends on how fast the issue can be resolved, he added.
“It’s inconvenient, but it’s not unprecedented, although this kind of event may materially alter market structure or price discovery,” he said. “Current price action already reflects markets being affected: the markets have been relatively flat and trading in a very tight range since 26 November, Wednesday, around ~10 PM EST. And until the issue is resolved, I would expect that behaviour and price action to continue.”
It’s not the first time the CME has had to shut down electronic trade. Back in 2014, technical issues shut down some trading on the CME’s Globex electronic system, impacting agricultural contracts.
Last year, trading of equities, bonds and exchange-traded funds was also temporarily halted in Switzerland after stock exchange SIX had problems disseminating data.
Syazwan’s own trades have not been impacted, he told CNBC.
“I had already anticipated the major markets — especially the U.S. indices — to consolidate until the start of next year, so I went on early holiday at the beginning of the month,” he said.
— CNBC’s Lisa Kailai Han and Matt Ward-Perkins contributed to this article.
