CME cooling failure halts Globex crypto derivatives

CME Group’s electronic futures and options markets remained halted for much of the morning on November 28, 2025, after a cooling failure at a CyrusOne data center disrupted the Globex trading platform. The interruption took CME’s regulated cryptocurrency derivatives offline alongside contracts covering interest rates, equity indexes, foreign exchange, energy, metals and agriculture.

CME first reported the problem at approximately 02:40 UTC on November 28, according to contemporaneous reporting. The exchange subsequently scheduled a 13:00 UTC pre-open and a 13:30 UTC reopening for Globex futures and options. That produces an alert-to-reopening interval of approximately 10 hours and 50 minutes, although it is not a contract-by-contract measure of downtime and should not be read as one.

A regulated crypto venue goes dark

CME’s cryptocurrency complex included futures and options tied to bitcoin and ether, together with smaller contracts and products linked to other digital assets. Reuters reported that the interruption affected all futures and options contracts on Globex. CME’s reference-rate products were separate from the exchange-traded contracts, and the surviving contemporaneous record reviewed for this reconstruction does not establish whether every crypto reference rate or settlement calculation was independently interrupted.

The outage mattered because CME had become an important centrally cleared route through which institutions could hedge cryptocurrency exposure without holding digital assets directly. Four days earlier, on November 24, CME announced that its cryptocurrency futures and options suite had reached a record daily volume of 794,903 contracts on November 21. That figure covered the entire CME crypto suite for that earlier trading day; it does not measure activity lost during the November 28 interruption.

Spot cryptocurrency markets continued operating on independent venues. The resulting split was therefore not a shutdown of Bitcoin, Ethereum or crypto trading generally. It was a temporary loss of one regulated derivatives venue used for price discovery, hedging and basis trades between spot and futures markets.

Thin holiday trading limited what could be measured

The disruption occurred during the post-Thanksgiving session, when U.S. securities markets were operating shortened hours and expected trading activity was comparatively light. That timing may have reduced the amount of affected activity, but the evidence available on November 28 did not support a precise estimate of missed cryptocurrency volume, displaced trades or financial losses.

Contemporaneous reports showed the outage extending through Asian and European trading hours. Bloomberg Index Services issued an announcement saying it was monitoring potential effects on indices. Reuters reported that some brokers withdrew affected products while benchmark futures prices stopped updating.

No verified event-day dataset reviewed for this reconstruction isolates the outage’s effect on bitcoin or ether prices. Any claim that the failure caused a specific spot-market move would therefore exceed the evidence. The clearer conclusion is structural: crypto’s underlying networks remained available while a major institutional access layer did not.

Infrastructure becomes market structure

CME attributed the halt on November 28 to a cooling issue at CyrusOne data centers, without providing a detailed event-day technical account. That explanation placed physical infrastructure—not blockchain consensus, smart-contract code or crypto custody—at the center of the disruption.

The episode demonstrated that regulated digital-asset markets inherit the operational dependencies of conventional finance. Central clearing and standardized contracts can reduce some counterparty and execution risks, but they also concentrate activity in exchanges, data centers, market-data systems and clearing infrastructure whose availability affects many products simultaneously.

Later confirmation

In a Form 10-K filed on February 26, 2026, CME described the event as a critical cooling failure caused by human error at its largest data center. The company said it chose to halt its markets, reopened them on a delayed basis the following day and considered the business impact limited and not material. That filing is later confirmation and was not information available to market participants on November 28, 2025.