The encyclopedia · Engineering & Operations · Operational decision · 2025
A chiller failure in an Aurora data centre froze global futures trading for 10 hours
A chiller failure at CyrusOne's CHI1 site overheated CME's exchange, halting global futures for 10 hours. CME bet the outage was brief and skipped its DR site.
CyrusOne · CME Group · 2025-11-28
What happened
On November 28, 2025 a chiller plant failure at CyrusOne's CHI1 data centre in Aurora, Illinois — about 50 miles from Chicago — overheated the facility that hosts CME Group's exchange, sending temperatures above 100°F.
CME halted trading in global futures — gold, oil and interest rates — for more than 10 hours, affecting markets from Tokyo to London. S&P futures reopened down 0.1% when trading resumed.
CME chose not to fail over to its New York disaster-recovery site, believing the outage would be brief. The decision extended a manageable cooling fault into a global market event.
A chill, invisible failure — a failed chiller — that stopped the world's futures markets for half a day.
Why it happened
- CME's decision to stay on the failing primary site rather than switch to the NY disaster-recovery site assumed the outage would be short — a judgment made on outage duration, not on risk.
- CyrusOne's single chiller plant at CHI1 had no resilient redundancy, so one plant failure took the whole cooling load down with the facility hosting a globally critical exchange.
- A 10-hour halt of global futures is the cost of placing an exchange's continuity on one facility's assumption that cooling problems are short-lived.
- The outage was operational: a mechanical failure upstream, and a failover decision downstream that converted it into a market-wide stop.
The lesson
A disaster-recovery site is only useful if you use it. When a host's cooling fails, betting on a short outage is a bet on someone else's machinery — a global market stop is the price of that bet.
Aftermath
Trading resumed after more than 10 hours, with S&P futures opening slightly lower. The failure exposed how much of global futures trading rests on the cooling of one facility.
Sources
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