WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - The Chicago Mercantile Exchange got back to business on Friday after a lengthy outage that disrupted trading across Asia and Europe during a short holiday week in the U.S. CME's Globex Futures & Options platform, which accounts for about 90 percent of their trading volume, opened again at 8:30 a.m. New York time.
Even then, trading was still a bit slow, and some Treasury-linked products were experiencing delays.
The downtime, which lasted around ten hours, was due to a cooling system failure at a crucial data center in Aurora, Illinois, run by CyrusOne. This facility has been central to CME's electronic trading for nearly twenty years and is crucial for high-frequency traders who set up shop nearby to get the fastest execution times.
Because of the outage, trading in S&P 500 futures and other significant contracts came to a halt, forcing some traders to pivot to cash Treasuries or look for other options as liquidity dried up.
This added some extra challenges for investors dealing with month-end rollovers amidst a thinly traded session right after Thanksgiving.
CME decided to restart operations from Aurora instead of switching to its disaster recovery site in New York, thinking that the problem would be sorted out more quickly that way.
This incident has raised fresh worries about how global futures trading is concentrated and the risks tied to having single points of failure in crucial market infrastructure.
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