Cooling failure at Aurora data center halts CME trading for hours
A cooling-system malfunction at a data center in Aurora, Illinois halted futures and options trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for hours, disrupting activity tied to one of the world’s largest derivatives venues. The stoppage affected order flows and liquidity for a broad set of contracts, highlighting the outsized impact a single facility’s failure can have on price discovery and market functioning across time zones.
The incident raises fresh questions about physical infrastructure redundancy, disaster recovery plans and third‑party dependency for major exchanges and their participants. Market participants and regulators are likely to press for post‑incident reviews and clearer contingency arrangements as firms assess short‑term exposures, margin pressures and routing failovers. The outage is a reminder that even technologically advanced markets remain vulnerable to basic hardware and facility issues, prompting renewed focus on resilience measures.