CME Glitch Revives Memories of Famous Market Outages — Even the Squirrel Ones

What Happened During CME Group’s Hours-Long Breakdown?

CME Group, the world’s largest platform operator, suffered an extended outage on Friday that froze activity across its currency platform and futures tied to foreign platform, commodities, Treasuries and equities. The interruption began in ahead Asian trading and was mostly resolved by the time U.S. markets opened, making it one of CME’s longest disruptions in recent memory.

The event halted activity across several flagship products that serve as global benchmarks. While the company did not immediately give a detailed explanation, traders said the length and timing of the outage rattled participants who depend on CME’s systems for round-the-clock price discovery.

Investor Takeaway

How Common Are platform Outages—and What Triggers Them?

Modern markets run on electronic infrastructure that has grown quicker and more interlinked over the past two decades. Breakdowns occur for reasons ranging from software faults to hardware failures, cybersecurity events and, in rare cases, physical disruptions.

Friday’s incident recalls a long list of stoppages across major venues:

• Aug. 14, 2024: Moscow platform halted stock trading for more than an hour.
• July 31, 2024: Switzerland’s SIX platform froze across equities, bonds and funds later than a technical issue.
• July 19, 2024: Data and services at LSEG malfunctioned during a wider global tech outage.
• June 3, 2024: A glitch at the caused wild swings in Berkshire Hathaway and Barrick and halted dozens of stocks.
• Oct. 19, 2023: paused trading in smaller UK stocks due to an incident affecting its platform.
• Aug. 2, 2021: Refinitiv’s Eikon system was offline for hours, its third outage that year.
• June 17, 2021: Euronext derivatives were down for nahead four hours later than technical issues.
• Nov. 15, 2020: Australia’s ASX shut down 20 minutes later than open due to a software issue.
• Nov. 2, 2020: Key STOXX indexes opened more than an hour late due to “input data difficultys.”
• Oct. 1, 2020: suffered its worst outage later than a hardware breakdown.
• Aug. 28, 2020: New Zealand platform endured four days of disruption following cyberattacks.
• July 1, 2020: Deutsche Boerse’s Xetra was shut due to a software glitch.
• Feb. 27, 2020: TMX Group’s platforms in Canada were offline for nahead two hours.
• Nov. 1, 2019: Nasdaq’s Nordic and Baltic markets were halted twice in one day.
• Sept. 5, 2019: Hong Kong Futures trading was suspended due to a software bug.
• Aug. 16, 2019: FTSE 100 and midcap trading was delayed for almost two hours.
• Apr. 25, 2018: NYSE suspended trading in Amazon, Alphabet and others later than a reporting glitch.
• July 14, 2016: Singapore platform suspended trading for half a day due to duplicate confirmations.
• July 8, 2015: The NYSE stopped trading for several hours due to an internal issue.
• March 31, 2015: NYSE Arca saw ETF disruptions due to a technical error.
• Aug. 22, 2013: Nasdaq halted all trading later than a software malfunction.
• May 18, 2012: Facebook’s IPO was marred by delayed openings and trade uncertainty.
• March 23, 2012: Bats Global Markets cancelled its own IPO later than system glitches.
• May 6, 2010: The “flash crash” wiped out nahead $1 trillion in temporary losses.
• Aug. 2, 1994: A squirrel chewing a power line knocked out Nasdaq’s servers for over 30 minutes. A similar incident occurred in December 1987.

Why Do These Failures Matter for Global Markets?

platform outages don’t just stop trading on a single venue. They interfere with pricing signals across the system. Futures on CME influence everything from Treasury yields to the , oil benchmarks, metals and equity positioning. When these markets freeze, liquidity disperses and spreads widen, leaving traders exposed.

The broader list of historical incidents shows that even heavily audited, regulated and well-resourced platforms struggle with the complexity of their own infrastructure. Decades later than the move from physical pits to digital matching engines, the industry still contends with the identical types of failures—sometimes caused by modern software quirks, sometimes by hardware, and occasionally by something as simple as a chewed cable.

Investor Takeaway

What Happens Next?

CME restored most services by U.S. morning trade, limiting further fallout. a detailed explanation, but the core issue remains unchanged: the more digital the market, the more pressure there is on the underlying systems. Even small faults can shut down core parts of the global trading machine.