Foto: Joseph Sohm/Shutterstock
One of the world’s largest trading platforms has been completely offline since Friday morning. CME Group, the beating heart of the futures and derivatives market, had to abruptly pause trading due to a technical problem at CyrusOne’s data centers. The result: frozen prices, worldwide delays, and unprecedented chaos in an already thin market following Thanksgiving.
Prices Frozen: From S&P 500 to Gold and Forex #
The first reports came in overnight that CME’s systems were no longer responding. A cooling failure at CyrusOne, which manages more than 55 data centers in the US, Europe, and Japan, took down the Globex infrastructure. This eliminated live prices for dozens of market benchmarks. The S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, and 10-year Treasury futures were no longer updated, nor were oil, gold, and other commodities.
The EBS forex market, responsible for billions in daily trading volume, also froze completely. Major currency pairs like euro/dollar and dollar/yen stood still for hours, leaving brokers without reliable prices. Many parties had to temporarily remove products from trading or switch to internal emergency data.
Spot forex could partially divert to alternative platforms, but for futures there was simply no escape: the market was locked. This happened precisely when month-end activities create extra demand for price information, and thus cause stress.
Chaos in Precious Metals Market #
The timing caused extra uproar, especially since silver was just setting a new all-time high when the systems failed. This led to many reactions, including from Dutch analyst Madelon Vos:
“Coincidentally, this ‘problem’ occurred just as silver was setting a new all-time high. Coincidence?,” said Vos.
Gold prices also stood still for hours, something precious metals experts say has rarely happened before.
Investor and author Willem Middelkoop pointed out that silver was still trading in China around $55.60, a price divergence he called historic. Middelkoop even warned of a possible run toward $60 “in days” and possibly $100 “in months.”
Notably, the outage came after a period in which CME saw record volumes in crypto futures. In October, the platform recorded its highest trading volume ever with an average of 26.3 million contracts per day. Despite the recent dip in crypto activity, CME is actually expanding its offering, with new spot-quoted futures for Solana and XRP going live next month and plans for 24/7 crypto trading starting in 2026.