Author: admin

By Barbara Kollmeyer

CyrusOne says a cooling issue at a Chicago-area data center had impacted customers, including CME

The CME said Friday that futures trading has been halted for several markets due to a technical problem.

U.S. equity futures were finally back up and running just ahead of the opening of regular trading on Friday after a glitch at a data center in Chicago knocked markets out for several hours.

The outage had affected futures and options markets for stocks, commodities, as well as the EBS foreign-exchange platform and another for fixed-income trading. “All CME Group markets are open and trading,” the exchange said in a statement on X.

CME had blamed the outage, which began hours earlier, on a cooling issue at a data center. In an emailed comment to MarketWatch, a spokesperson for CyrusOne said it had been responding to a cooling problem at its CHI1 data center facility in the Chicago area affecting certain customers, including CME.

“On November 27, our CHI1 facility experienced a chiller plant failure affecting multiple cooling units. Our engineering teams, along with specialized mechanical contractors, are on-site working to restore full cooling capacity. We have successfully restarted several chillers at limited capacity and have deployed temporary cooling equipment to supplement our permanent systems,” said the spokesperson.

The world’s biggest operator of derivatives exchanges, the CME also runs the New York Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade. Futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average (YM00) , S&P 500 (ES00) and Nasdaq-100 (NQ00) were moving modestly higher.

The CME also had a major outage in early 2019, which halted trading across all of its platforms, but equity futures trading was down for three hours, as opposed to Friday’s seemingly much longer outage.

The stock market was already set for a shortened day of trading on Black Friday, with the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq exchange due to close at 1 p.m. ET, following Thursday’s Thanksgiving Day closure. Volumes tend to be lower on the day after the holiday, which can mean even small orders could cause big swings.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA and S&P 500 SPX each finished up nearly 0.7% on Wednesday, bringing week-to-date advances to 2.6% and 3.2%, respectively. Both indexes were on track for their strongest Thanksgiving-week performances since 2012, based on preliminary data from Dow Jones Market Data. The Nasdaq composite finished 0.8%, bringing its week-to-date gain to 4.2% and on track for its best Thanksgiving-week performance since 2008, when it rose 10.9%.

Read: Stocks stage powerful comeback ahead of Thanksgiving. It wasn’t enough to erase November’s losses.

-Barbara Kollmeyer

This content was created by MarketWatch, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. MarketWatch is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

  (END) Dow Jones Newswires

  11-28-25 0915ET
Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

BERLIN — The Swedish government promised on Friday to fight the sale of childlike sex dolls online after instances of such commerce had been reported earlier in the country.

“I think I react on behalf of all parents when I say that, as a mother, your heart really breaks watching these images and pictures of these dolls,” Sweden’s Minister for Social Services, Camilla Waltersson Grönvall, told The Associated Press.

The Swedish government wants “to make sure these products cannot any more be sold and bought anywhere,” she said.

She spoke after a meeting which the Swedish government convened on Friday “in response to several notable cases of e-commerce companies selling childlike sex dolls,” according to a statement by her ministry. Child protection groups, online vendors and government agencies participated.

The online platforms described the measures they are taking to make sure these kinds of products are no longer sold online, Waltersson Grönvall said.

Asked whether the ministry considers those measures sufficient, Waltersson Grönvall said: “I have been very clear that we will follow this very closely and we will not hesitate to take further action, which might involve further legislation if that is considered necessary.”

She said the government was preparing a strategy on protecting children from violence, which included steps to prevent sexual and online abuse.

The online sale of the disputed dolls in Sweden came to the public’s attention after the child protection group ChildX filed a police report against Amazon and several other e-commerce platforms earlier this month over the sale of sex dolls with a clear childlike appearance.

“The products, approximately one meter in length, are often dressed in school uniforms and marketed in a sexualized context,” the group said. “Swedish legislation prohibits material that portrays children in a sexualized manner. The sale or distribution of lifelike child-like sex dolls may thus fall under criminal provisions related to child sexual exploitation.”

ChildX Secretary General Ida Östensson, also speaking by phone to the AP, said that “our police complaint against Amazon and other sites for selling child-like sex dolls, together with public advocacy, led to the removal of these listings on Amazon.”

“We are taking this step because these products are designed to sexualize children,” said Östensson. “Their open sale and marketing fuel a culture that normalizes the sexual abuse of children. This is unacceptable. Children should never be commodified for sexual purposes.”

When reached by email, online vendor Amazon said it did not have anything to share beyond what it had previously told other media, which was that the company would attend Friday’s meeting and had taken products that had been flagged offline.

“We have strict policies and guidelines in the segment of adult products and we have always strictly prohibited child pornography,” an Amazon spokesperson was quoted by French daily Le Monde on Nov. 12.

In November, France’s government said it was moving toward suspending access to the Shein online marketplace until it proves its content conforms to French law, after authorities found illegal weapons and child-like sex dolls for sale on the fast-fashion giant’s website.

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Claudia Ciobanu reported from from Warsaw, Poland.