CME Outage Halts Global Futures Trading; Gold and Silver Markets See Extreme Volatility

A major outage at CME Group halted trading across a broad range of futures products today, affecting foreign exchange, commodities, U.S. Treasuries and equity benchmarks. The exchange said the disruption was caused by a cooling issue at its data-center provider, CyrusOne.

CME Group confirmed the issue in a statement posted on X:

“Due to a cooling issue at CyrusOne data centers, our markets are currently halted. Support is working to resolve the issue in the near term and will advise clients of Pre-Open details as soon as they are available.”

CME first reported the disruption at 02:40 GMT. By 07:20 GMT, futures prices for WTI crude, 10-year Treasuries, the S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, Nikkei, palm oil and gold had not updated, according to LSEG data. Pricing also froze on the EBS FX platform — which averages nearly $60 billion in daily volume — including major pairs such as EUR/USD and USD/JPY.

Spot forex trading continued via alternative venues, but brokers said the outage left them without reliable benchmark pricing. Some pulled products entirely.

“It’s just a pain… I’ve never seen such a widespread exchange outage in 20 years,” said Christopher Forbes, Head of Asia and Middle East at CMC Markets. He noted the firm suspended trading in several commodity contracts and relied on internal models for pricing. “We’re now taking a lot of unnecessary risk here to continue pricing. I think it will be a bit volatile on the open.”

 

Gold Traders Flood X With Reports of Platform Freezes

Gold traders on X reported widespread platform disruptions, including stalled feeds on MT5, price freezes, and unexpected stops. Many compared which brokers were affected, noting that some platforms halted gold trading entirely.

Others warned traders to avoid gold trading for the day due to unstable pricing and the lack of reliable CME benchmarks.

 

Gold price spike down; Silver future Hits a Record High in short time

Charts shared on social media showed sudden spikes down in gold shortly after the outage began, Gold spreads widened sharply to unusually extreme levels rarely seen in the market. Silver futures also surged sharply then got halted within 1 hour.

 

The volatility, combined with frozen benchmark feeds, prompted many brokers to limit execution or switch to internal pricing models.

CyrusOne, based in Dallas, operates more than 55 data centers across the U.S., Europe and Japan. CME Group — the world’s largest exchange operator by market value — has not yet provided a detailed timeline for full service restoration but said teams are working to resolve the issue.

Markets are expected to experience elevated volatility once trading resumes and live pricing is restored.