A data centre fault halted activity on the CME for several hours on Friday, bringing futures trading to a standstill and fanning concerns over global markets’ heavy reliance on a single exchange. CME Group, the world’s largest derivatives exchange, succeeded in restoring operations an hour before Friday’s Wall Street stock market open, after an almost 10-hour outage that hampered investors’ ability to transact in equities, bonds, currencies and commodities.
“Today’s disruption shows how concentrated futures markets really are — there just aren’t many alternative venues for the main products,” said Thomas Texier, group head of clearing at Marex.
