According to CME, human error caused a cooling tower drainage issue at its Illinois data center, triggering a prolonged shutdown and raising concerns about reliance on a single site.
On December 7, CME markets were halted for more than 10 hours following a CyrusOne data center failure in Illinois. CME attributed the incident to human error involving improper cooling tower drainage, which led to freezing and subsequent overheating of equipment. Initial repair attempts worsened the situation. The outage disrupted CME’s markets and highlighted operational risks tied to reliance on a single facility, without apparent failover to the backup site in New York.