The world's largest derivatives exchange has experienced another system malfunction. On February 25th local time, a technical failure occurred at CME Group, forcing a trading halt in its natural gas and metals futures markets for over half an hour. The metals market on the group's Globex electronic trading platform, which hosts the primary U.S. gold futures contract (COMEX gold), was suspended at 12:15 PM local time and did not resume until 1:45 PM. Additionally, the natural gas futures and options market faced an approximately 35-minute trading disruption.
A system alert posted on the CME Group website indicated that at 12:11 PM on February 25th, the Global Command Center (GCC) reported being aware of a technical issue impacting metals and natural gas futures and options and had launched an investigation. Four minutes later, at 12:15 PM, CME Group officially announced that the aforementioned markets had been "paused." By 12:33 PM, an operational notice was issued stating all day orders and Good-Till-Date (GTD) orders marked for that day would be cancelled, with only confirmed Good-Till-Cancelled (GTC) orders remaining active. At 12:40 PM, CME provided a specific restart time for the natural gas futures market, which reopened at 12:50 PM. A separate notice followed for the metals futures market, setting its reopening for 1:45 PM, approximately 55 minutes later than natural gas.
CME Group did not specify the exact cause of this technical failure.
Following the outage, Bloomberg data showed that starting from 2:00 AM Beijing Time on February 26th, trading data for COMEX gold, silver, copper futures, and NYMEX natural gas futures successively appeared "missing." The timing of this disruption coincided with the expiration date of the March natural gas futures contract, making its market impact significant.
This incident marks the latest in a series of recent system failures at CME Group. On November 28, 2025, Beijing Time, a system malfunction halted trading on CME's currency trading platform and futures markets covering foreign exchange, commodities, Treasuries, and equities, freezing some benchmark indices and prompting brokers to withdraw related products. CME attributed that nearly 10-hour outage to an issue with the cooling system at its CyrusOne data center.
Earlier, on January 27th, an abnormal approximately two-minute trading halt during the market close at CME's New York Mercantile Exchange (Nymex) resulted in deviations in settlement prices.
As the world's largest derivatives exchange, CME Group set a monthly record in April 2025 with average daily volume reaching 35.9 million contracts. The group's dominant position in global markets and derivatives trading means that its system failures can significantly impact investors' ability to trade. This latest outage also underscores the concentration risk inherent in hosting such a vast and diverse range of markets within a single trading venue.
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