CME Suffers Four-Hour Outage on Sunday that Halts Trading

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange suffered a technical outage on Sunday on its Globex markets platform that halted trading for about four hours.

Mercifully, the fact that it was on Sunday made matters easier as the day is rather uneventful for most electronic trading companies.

CME confirmed that trading, which was set to begin at 5.00 p.m. in Chicago for some products, didn’t start until 9.00 p.m. The outage affected all markets except for the Malaysian equity-index derivatives. CME has stated it will reverse all day and session orders executed on August 24, including good-till-date orders.

“CME Globex markets were halted due to a technical issue resulting from planned software reconfigurations made over the weekend as part of ongoing technology enhancement projects,” Laurie Bischel, a spokeswoman for CME Group in Chicago, wrote in an e-mail seen by Bloomberg News. “All CME Globex markets are open and operating normally this morning and have been since trading began at 9 p.m. Chicago time yesterday.”

The disruption was one of the longest for a trading exchange this year, and occurred a year after Nasdaq OMX Group Inc’s platform crashed on Aug. 22, 2013, resulting in a three-hour stoppage for some of the major U.S. stocks. This prompted the U.S. regulators to order exchange to improve their reliability. CME also suffered from a 90-minute trading stoppage that affected some agricultural futures on April 8.

CME Group stocks jumped 1.2 percent to trade at $75.76 as of 12:29 p.m. in New York on Monday, rising for the fourth consecutive day. To register for a free 2-week subscription to ForexMinute Premium Plan, visit www.forexminute.com/newsletter.

To contact the reporter of this story; Yashu Gola at yashu@forexminute.com