Thanksgiving weekend is supposed to be quiet for markets. Families eating turkey, traders sneaking an extra day off, liquidity thinner than gravy. Then, at roughly 9:45 p.m. ET on Thursday, something broke in a very expensive way.
Every major futures contract traded on the CME Globex platform simply stopped updating. S&P 500 futures, Treasury futures, crude oil, gold, eurodollars, forex crosses – gone. No bids, no offers, no heartbeat. The culprit? A cooling system failure at a CyrusOne data center in Chicago. In 2025. Because apparently even the beating heart of global risk still runs on air conditioning that can fail on a random November night.
A Black Friday Unlike Any Other
I’ve been around markets long enough to remember the 2010 Flash Crash, the Knight Capital glitch, even the brief NYSE halt in 2015. But I can’t recall a single event that took the entire U.S. futures complex offline for hours on the day monthly and weekly options expire, contracts roll, and month-end rebalancing looms.
Yet when cash equities opened on Friday (shortened session, closing at 1 p.m. ET), the S&P 500 was higher. The Nasdaq was higher. Even the Mag-7 names that everyone loves to hate were all green in pre-market. It felt almost surreal.
What Actually Stopped Trading?
Pretty much everything that matters to institutional flow:
- All equity index futures (ES, NQ, RTY, YM)
- Interest rate complex (Treasury futures, SOFR, Eurodollars)
- Energy (WTI, Brent, RBOB, HO)
- Metals (gold, silver, copper)
- Major FX pairs
- Agricultural contracts
Only the cash stock market, ETFs, and a handful of alternative venues kept running normally. For anyone needing to hedge, roll, or rebalance, it was the financial equivalent of the highway disappearing while you’re doing 80 mph.
Why Markets Didn’t Panic
Three reasons, in my view.
First, it happened over a U.S. holiday with naturally low participation. Many prop desks and hedge funds were running skeleton crews. The people who were working probably spent the first hour assuming it was their own terminal acting up.
Second, the outage hit after the November options expiry chaos was already behind us (that happened the previous week). The really violent gamma squeezes had already played out.
Third – and this is the part that fascinates me – everyone has become weirdly comfortable with the idea that the plumbing can break and nothing truly bad happens. We’ve had GameStop, Archegos, LDI blowups in the UK, and now a full CME blackout, and the S&P still grinds higher. Risk premia feel anesthetized.
The Roll Nightmare That Wasn’t
Friday was front-month expiry for gasoline and heating oil – contracts that can actually lead to physical delivery. Traders normally roll positions days in advance precisely to avoid being stuck if something goes wrong on the last day. This time, something went wrong anyway.
Remarkably, the CME managed to reopen Globex at 7:30 a.m. CT (8:30 a.m. ET), roughly ten hours after the initial failure. By the cash open, most markets had at least some liquidity back, even if spreads were ten times normal and depth looked ugly.
“Some participants will exploit price discrepancies across venues. Most will just sit on their hands until it’s fixed. Nobody wants to catch a falling knife in zero-liquidity conditions.”
– London-based macro trader, speaking on background
Meanwhile, in the Cash Market…
Individual stocks traded completely normally. Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft – all up nicely as Black Friday online numbers started trickling in stronger than many bears expected. Tesla shrugged off yet another controversy and printed fresh all-time highs.
It created this bizarre split-screen: the professional risk-management layer of the market was effectively blind, while retail kept clicking “buy” on the Mag-7 in their brokerage apps. In a way, it perfectly illustrates where we are in late 2025 – the real economy and the risk economy have decoupled more than ever.
The Bigger Picture Nobody Wants to Talk About
Data centers are the new too-big-to-fail. We spend billions on AI chips, low-latency microwave networks, and quantum-resistant encryption, yet the whole system can be taken down by a refrigerant leak or a failed chiller pump.
Think about that. One facility in the Chicago area – not even a primary site for many firms – brought global futures to a standstill. And we’re about to stuff these buildings with orders of magnitude more power-hungry GPUs for the next AI arms race.
If a cooling failure can do this on a sleepy holiday Friday, what happens when someone actually attacks the grid? Or when summer heatwaves push power demand past breaking point? These aren’t sci-fi scenarios anymore; they’re regulatory filings.
Rate Cut Expectations Actually Rose
Perhaps the most counter-intuitive move of the day: Fed funds futures (when they finally came back online) priced in a higher probability of a December cut – now north of 80%. Apparently, “systemic plumbing risk” is dovish now.
Investors seem to reason that if the Fed is the only entity that can print liquidity fast enough to paper over these cracks, then any sign of fragility makes them more likely to ease. It’s a hell of a feedback loop.
What Comes Next
Monday will be fascinating. Month-end rebalancing flows are large this time around, pension funds need to buy equities after the late-November rally, and a lot of hedges that couldn’t be rolled on Friday will need attention.
Expect chunky volume, wider spreads, and probably some sharp intraday swings as the market catches up with itself. Volatility sellers who’ve been paid handsomely all year might finally get a wake-up call.
Or… everything will open gap-up and grind higher because that’s what it does in 2025. Either way, I’ll be watching with a very large coffee.
One final thought: we keep being told the financial system is more resilient than ever. Maybe it is. But resilience and redundancy are different things. Friday showed we still have single points of failure that can freeze trillions in notional value because somebody’s air conditioner threw a fit.
In a world obsessed with black swans, sometimes the grey rhino in the server room is scarier.
