Cooling Failure at Aurora Data Center Halts CME Trading for Hours

A critical cooling failure at a CyrusOne-operated data center in Aurora forced the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) to suspend trading for several hours on November 27. The outage, triggered by simultaneous chiller plant failures, caused temperatures to spike beyond SAFE operational limits, prompting an automatic shutdown of servers handling equities, forex, bonds, and commodities contracts. The disruption froze markets linked to trillions of dollars in notional value.

CyrusOne deployed temporary cooling units to stabilize the facility while engineers restored primary systems. Despite the site's redundant cooling design—including air-cooled chillers and cold-weather air intake—backup systems failed to prevent the outage. Weather logs showed temperatures at 28°F that morning, well within the operational threshold for auxiliary cooling.

The incident underscores the fragility of always-on financial infrastructure, where a single point of failure can paralyze global markets. As data centers grow increasingly central to crypto and traditional finance, this event may accelerate demand for geographically distributed redundancy solutions.