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CME blamed the outage, which halted trading for more than 11 hours, on a cooling failure at a data centre in Chicago.

Global futures markets were thrown into chaos for several hours after CME Group, the world’s largest exchange operator, suffered one of its longest outages in years, halting trading across stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies.

By 13:35 GMT on Friday, trading in foreign exchange, stock and bond futures as well as other products had resumed, after having been knocked out for more than 11 hours because of an outage at an important data centre, according to LSEG data.

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CME blamed the outage on a cooling failure at data centres run by CyrusOne, which said its Chicago-area facility had affected services for customers, including CME.

The disruption stopped trading in major currency pairs on CME’s EBS platform, as well as benchmark futures for West Texas Intermediate crude, Nasdaq 100, Nikkei, palm oil and gold, according to LSEG data.

‘A black eye’

Trading volumes have been thinned out this week by the United States Thanksgiving holiday, and with dealers looking to close positions for the end of the month, there was a risk of volatility picking up sharply later on, market participants said.

“It’s a black eye to the CME and probably an overdue reminder of the importance of market structure and how interconnected all these are,” Ben Laidler, head of equity strategy at Bradesco BBI, said.

“We complacently take for granted that much of the timing is frankly not great. It’s month-end, a lot of things get rebalanced.”

“Having said that, it could have been a lot worse; it’ll be a very low-volume day. If you’re going to have it, there would have been worse days to have a breakdown like this,” he said.

Futures are a mainstay of financial markets and are used by dealers, speculators and businesses wishing to hedge or hold positions in a wide range of underlying assets. Without these and other instruments, brokers were left flying blind, and many were reluctant to trade contracts with no live prices for hours on end.

“Beyond the immediate risk of traders being unable to close positions – and the potential costs that follow – the incident raises broader concerns about reliability,” said Axel Rudolph, senior technical analyst at trading platform IG.

A few European brokerages said earlier in the day they had been unable to offer trading in some products on certain futures contracts.

Regulators are tracking the situation, with both the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission confirming they are aware of the issue and conducting ongoing surveillance.

Biggest exchange operator

CME is the biggest exchange operator by market value and says it offers the widest range of benchmark products, spanning rates, equities, metals, energy, cryptocurrencies and agriculture.

Average daily derivatives volume was 26.3 million contracts in October, CME said earlier this month.

The CME outage on Friday comes more than a decade after the operator had to shut electronic trading for some agricultural contracts in April 2014 due to technical problems, which at the time sent traders back onto the floor.

More recently, in 2024, outages at LSEG and Switzerland’s exchange operator briefly interrupted markets.

CME’s own shares were up 0.4 percent in premarket trading.

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The writer is a former global head of equity capital markets at Bank of America and is now a managing director at Seda Experts.

It’s that time of year again: investment banks are announcing their latest slate of managing directors.

The ritual is as fraught as it is familiar. I still remember when my boss called me into his office 24 years ago to say I’d been promoted. It felt like a huge career breakthrough, but soon after the list of new MDs was published, a colleague warned me the bank would pay me less that year, knowing the title alone would keep me happy. I thought he was joking but it turned out that he was right.

Investment banks devote enormous resources each year to the MD promotion cycle. For anyone unfamiliar with investment banks, managing directors sit at the top of the hierarchy, above analysts, associates, vice-presidents, and directors. Outside the C-suite, it is the highest title at most firms, although a few banks have an additional tier of partners or senior MDs. So gaining the MD rank can be the defining moment in a banking career.

Yet it remains unclear whether the elaborate selection process — replete with committees, revenue trackers, 360-degree performance reviews, and senior leadership sign-off — leads to better decisions or simply creates the appearance of fairness.

At one level, the promotion process has impeccable rigour. A committee of senior MDs is convened, each assessing two or three candidates each. Candidates submit about 10 internal references, though committee members conduct their own checks. The committee factors in revenue scorecards, peer feedback and broader considerations such as regional representation, diversity, and coverage across different parts of the firm. The system is built to look unimpeachably meritocratic.

But anyone who has sat on these committees knows that politics and personalities inevitably intrude. Senior MDs quietly lobby for their protégés, and top leadership can override the committee’s recommendations. Last-minute decisions to promote office favourites occasionally happen.

Judging candidates is genuinely hard; comparing them is harder. How do you benchmark a Houston-based energy M&A banker against a German debt capital markets originator? Their skills, markets and revenue profiles bear almost no resemblance, and yet the system demands you rank them. One may make the cut, the other not.

The questions asked in the promotion committee highlight the salient issues. Is this person indispensable or replaceable? Do they have their own client franchise, or are they a supporting player to a rainmaker? How valuable is their “seat” at the bank? How likely are they to leave if passed over for promotion? These are perennial questions, and they also reveal how much of the process rests on finely balanced, ineradicably subjective judgments.

Across most big investment banks, only one-third to one-half of eligible directors make the jump to managing director in a given year. The title still carries weight, but at first the job barely changes. You don’t manage more people and the work looks much the same. After my own promotion, the only immediate difference was that I could put “managing director” on the pitch-book team page.

The real change is subtle and accrues over time. You gain the ability to say no without giving a long justification, the freedom to leave the office for a long lunch or a school play, and the authority to schedule calls around your own calendar instead of someone else’s. Those are valuable powers.

Later, compensation and influence begin to diverge. Some MDs build a franchise and flourish; others plateau and stagnate; a few crash and burn. The title just opens a door.

It’s easy to be cynical about the whole thing but one moment has stayed with me. A senior colleague and I video-called a banker based in a small Asian market to deliver happy promotion news. He was talented and hardworking, but operating in a place with limited revenue potential. So his MD prospects had always been on a knife-edge.

When he heard the decision, tears welled up in his eyes. He spoke with unfiltered joy about what promotion meant to him and his family — proof that his contributions were appreciated, that his work really mattered to his colleagues and clients, that he was respected by his peers.

That moment reminded me that, for all the processes and politics, MD promotion still taps into something deeply human: the need for recognition. For many, that validation matters as much as — and sometimes more than — money. The managing director title may bring baubles and benefits, but its true value lies in what it means to those who earn it.

craig.coben@ft.com