SINGAPORE/LONDON, Nov 28 (Reuters) - An outage at the world's biggest exchange operator, CME Group, has halted trade on its currency platform and in futures spanning foreign exchange, commodities, Treasuries and stocks, freezing a handful of benchmarks as brokers pulled products.
The outage, which began early in Asian trading and was still ongoing at 1120 GMT, is one of the longest in years, market participants said.
The problem was due to a cooling issue at CyrusOne data centres, CME (CME.O), said in a statement, adding it was working to resolve it in the "near term".
Its Brokertec U.S. Actives and Brokertec EU platforms - both fixed income-focused - were open, CME said in its latest statement around 1100 GMT, but trade in other markets was halted.
A few European brokerages said they were unable to offer trading in some products on certain futures contracts.
CyrusOne said the issue was at its CHI1 data centre facility in the Chicago area, and had affected service for customers including CME.
"Our engineering teams, along with specialized mechanical contractors, are on-site working to restore full cooling capacity," a CyrusOne spokesperson said.
"We have successfully restarted several chillers at limited capacity and have deployed temporary cooling equipment to supplement our permanent systems."
DIFFICULTY TRADING WITHOUT LIVE PRICES
CME is the biggest exchange operator by market value and says it offers the widest range of benchmark products, spanning rates, equities, metals, energy, cryptocurrencies and agriculture.
It first posted about outages at 0240 GMT on its website.
Futures prices for West Texas Intermediate crude , 10-year U.S. Treasuries , the S&P 500 , Nasdaq 100 , Nikkei , palm oil and gold were among those not updated by 1100 GMT on Friday, according to LSEG Data.
Prices were also not updated on the EBS foreign exchange platform, which traded an average of almost $60 billion daily in October, in major pairs such as euro/dollar and dollar/yen.
While spot forex traders were more easily able to find other venues to execute deals, the outages left brokers flying blind and many reluctant to trade contracts with no live prices.
"It's just a pain in the arse, to be honest," said CMC Markets' head of Asia and Middle East, Christopher Forbes, who said he had never seen such a widespread exchange outage in 20 years.
CMC had pulled trade in a number of commodity contracts and in other products it had either switched its source or was relying on its own internal data and calculations to make prices for clients and even other brokers.
"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."
CME's own shares were down 0.7% in premarket trading.
THINNER TRADE AFTER THANKSGIVING
Futures are a mainstay of financial markets and used by dealers, speculators and businesses wishing to hedge or hold positions in a wide range of underlying assets.
Average daily derivatives volume was 26.3 million contracts in October, CME said earlier this month.
"It's not unprecedented, but it's certainly not 'normal service' for the platform that we’re all trading on to just die on us," Michael Brown, senior markets researcher at Pepperstone, said, referring to the broader market, not to his company's activity.
"If it has to happen, then today is probably the best day for it, because there’s probably not likely to be much in the way of market activity anyway," he said. Trading volumes have been thinned out this week by the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday.
Brokers Saxo Bank, XTB, and eToro all said on their websites or via statements that trading had been halted for a range of U.S. indexes, Treasury and commodity futures.The outage at CME on Friday comes more than a decade after the operator had to shut
electronic trade for some agricultural contracts in April 2014 due to technical problems, which at the time sent traders back on to the floor.
More recently in 2024 outages at LSEG and Switzerland's exchange operator briefly interrupted markets.
Reporting by Ankur Banerjee, Tom Westbrook, Rae Wee and Florence Tan in Singapore, Amanda Cooper, Lucy Raitano and Alun
John in London in London and Toby Sterling in Amsterdam; Editing by Christian Schmollinger, Shri Navaratnam, Thomas Derpinghaus and Alison Williams
