Chicago Mercantile Exchange halts trading, sparking public outcry

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) — the world's largest financial derivatives exchange — went dark for ~10 hours from Thursday into Friday, triggering massive backlash from traders before they finally restored service. The outage? A 'cooling issue' at the CyrusOne data center in Illinois, according to CME's official announcement.

Trading fully resumed at 1:30 pm UTC on Friday, but the damage was done — traders got locked in positions, couldn't place new trades, and price discovery went completely offline. The timing couldn't have been worse.

Traders absolutely roasted CME on X. Stock trader Timothy Bozman straight-up accused them of market manipulation, asking how 'a simple issue could take down CME's entire futures platform?'

The backlash continued even after the fix — traders noted the halt happened minutes before silver futures hit an all-time high of $54, fueling even more conspiracy theories.

While CME didn't publish Thanksgiving Day trading data, Bitcoin futures tell the real story — they closed Wednesday at $90,355 and opened Friday at $90,940, then continued climbing to over $93,000 as BTC rebounded from its $80,522 local bottom.

Analysts say BTC faces resistance at $95,000 — but if it breaks through, we could see a run back to $100k territory. Arthur Hayes called the $80k dip the market's lowest point, predicting higher levels in 2026 but warning about potential short-term drops along the way.