When the Refrigerator Breaks, the World’s Markets Freeze
For traders in London, Tokyo, and New York, the morning of Black Friday, November 28, 2025, wasn’t marked by holiday shopping deals; it was defined by a stunning, hours-long silence. The platform of the world’s largest derivatives exchange, the CME Group, had gone dark, bringing global futures and options trading to a chaotic standstill. The culprit? Not a cyberattack or a geopolitical crisis, but something far more mundane, yet catastrophically disruptive: a broken cooling system at a single, unassuming data center outside of Chicago.
This wasn’t just any computer room; it was the digital heart of the CME’s operations. By some estimates, an astronomical $25 quadrillion of notional trade volume flows through this facility every day, governing pricing for everything from crude oil and gold to U.S. equity and Treasury futures.
The disruption began late on Thursday evening with what the data center operator, CyrusOne, called a “chiller plant failure” at its CHI1 facility in Aurora, Illinois. The cooling issue immediately forced the exchange to shut down its entire Globex electronic trading platform to prevent overheating. Suddenly, the price discovery mechanisms for some of the world’s most liquid assets simply froze.
The Private Equity Factor
The story of the outage is not just about a technical glitch; it’s about the increasing financialization of essential infrastructure. The data center in question, a critical lynchpin of global finance, is operated by CyrusOne, a company that was taken private in 2022 in a blockbuster $15 billion deal by a consortium of powerful U.S. private equity groups: KKR and Global Infrastructure Partners.
The situation immediately sparked an uncomfortable conversation across Wall Street: What happens when the underlying plumbing of the financial system—the physical buildings and machinery—is owned by firms whose primary mandate is maximizing returns for their investors? The very facility that hosts CME’s main electronic trading hub is now a component in a private equity portfolio.
While the private owners stated their engineering teams were working “around the clock” to restore full capacity—restarting some chillers and deploying temporary cooling equipment—the damage was done. For hours, global investors, risk desks, and brokers were left operating with stale prices and reduced visibility, a particular nightmare for Asian and European traders who were in the middle of their market day.
The Global Ripple Effect
The CME Group is a giant, operating not only the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, but also the New York Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade. Its halt in trading sent ripples far beyond Chicago, affecting markets from Malaysia to London.
By Friday morning, a few peripheral platforms like the BrokerTec and EBS foreign exchange markets began to reopen, but the main futures and options markets remained stuck in limbo for a considerable amount of time. The timing was particularly sensitive, coming after the Thanksgiving holiday and on Black Friday, a shortened trading session that often has lower liquidity, magnifying the impact of any sudden halt.
As the incident highlights, in the age of high-speed electronic finance, the most high-tech trading desks are only as resilient as the air conditioning system in a facility 45 minutes from downtown. The massive outage serves as a stark, chilling reminder that the world’s financial stability now rests on the physical infrastructure that quietly whirs inside massive, privately owned sheds.