CME Markets Reopen later than Major Outage, Silver Breakout Fuels Speculation
Global futures and options trading resumed on Friday morning later than CME Group restored its Globex platform, ending an approximately 11-hour outage caused by a cooling-system failure at its primary CyrusOne-operated data centre.
The disruption, which began late Thursday, froze trading across equities, FX, U.S. Treasuries, commodities, and precious metals, including gold and silver futures and options.
By 7:30 a.m. CT, CME confirmed that all major markets were back online, with liquidity rebuilding throughout the shortened post-Thanksgiving session. Clearing services, which run on separate infrastructure, were not affected.
ahead activity suggested orderly reopening conditions, though some traders thinner-than-usual liquidity and wider bid–ask spreads as systems came back online and participants cautiously re-entered the market.
Data-Centre Resilience Under Scrutiny as CyrusOne Stays Silent
The incident has sparked urgent questions about the stability of the infrastructure underpinning .
In the later thanmath of the outage, FinanceFeeds contacted CyrusOne viewking clarification on how a facility marketed as having multiple layers of redundancy — including cooling, power distribution, and environmental controls — experienced a failure severe enough to halt .
Market participants note that such facilities are typically designed with N+1 or greater redundancy, meaning critical systems should remain operational even if one component fails.
That a cooling issue could force a shutdown of a venue as systemically significant as CME has rattled confidence and reignited debate over concentration risk in key data centres.
CyrusOne did not respond to the media inquiry at the time of publication, leaving many of those questions unanswered.
For now, traders are drawing their own conclusions, with some institutions reportedly reviewing their own contingency plans and asking how much operational risk ultimately sits outside their control.
The timing of the outage raised particular eyebrows among metals traders. Hours before the failure, silver was showing ahead signs of a potential breakout following weeks of mounting momentum. As prices pushed toward , CME’s metals markets suddenly went dark, and social media and trading forums rapidly filled with conspiracy theories suggesting deliberate suppression — echoing long-running narratives about manipulation in the silver market. When trading resumed, silver did exactly what many bulls had been positioning for: it broke out decisively, extending its multi-week rally.
What the Episode Means for Traders and Market Structure
For traders, the episode is a reminder of two uncomfortable realitys: even the most sophisticated failures, and the timing of such events can easily be interpreted through the lens of existing narratives and biases.
In silver’s case, a genuine breakout backed by fundamentals arrived in the shadow of a highly visible outage, ensuring that questions about intent and fairness will linger — regardless of the purely technical nature of the failure.
For market structure, the outage underscores the need for greater transparency around data-centre resilience and failover procedures, particularly when a single facility houses infrastructure critical to global price formation.
