CyrusOne Bolsters Cooling Infrastructure After Major Data Center Outage
A cooling system failure at CyrusOne’s CHI1 facility in Aurora, Illinois, triggered a 10-hour trading halt across CME Group’s global markets on November 28. Temperatures inside the data center exceeded 120°F, disabling the Globex platform and halting activity in futures, foreign exchange, commodities, and options. Traders from Singapore to London operated without price quotes or execution capabilities, amplifying volatility in assets like S&P 500 futures, U.S. Treasury bonds, crude oil, gold, and agricultural contracts.
The outage stemmed from a primary cooling loop malfunction, which prevented heat dissipation in server racks housing critical exchange infrastructure. CME Group’s backup data center in another location failed to activate automatically, extending the disruption into peak European hours. This marked one of the longest single-site failures for a major exchange operator, affecting an estimated $10 trillion in daily notional trading volume. Restoration began incrementally after manual interventions, with full operations resuming by early U.S. session.
CyrusOne, a KKR-owned provider of colocation services, confirmed the incident originated in a single cooling subsystem within the 1.2 million-square-foot CHI1 campus. The facility, which supports over 200 financial clients, features redundant power and network paths but exposed a vulnerability in thermal management during high-load periods. Bloomberg reported that the event coincided with elevated server utilization from algorithmic trading spikes, pushing ambient rack temperatures 30% above design thresholds.
In response, CyrusOne deployed additional backup cooling capacity by November 30, including modular chiller units and enhanced airflow monitoring. Engineers integrated real-time thermal sensors across 500 server aisles, linked to automated shutdown protocols for overheating zones. The upgrades add 25% more redundancy to the primary system, with failover tests confirming sub-5-minute recovery times. CME Group conducted joint audits, verifying no data loss occurred during the blackout.
This episode underscores escalating demands on data center resilience amid AI-driven compute growth. Global hyperscalers like Amazon and Microsoft reported 40% year-over-year increases in cooling energy consumption in Q3 2025, per Uptime Institute data. CyrusOne’s CHI1, operational since 2012, handles 15% of U.S. futures traffic but now faces scrutiny over aging HVAC infrastructure. Industry benchmarks from the Data Center Coalition indicate that thermal failures account for 18% of unplanned outages, up from 12% in 2023.
Financial regulators, including the CFTC, initiated reviews into the backup activation delay, citing potential systemic risks under Dodd-Frank protocols. CME disclosed no cyber involvement, attributing the issue solely to mechanical failure, but enhanced perimeter monitoring with AI anomaly detection. Traders incurred estimated $50 million in indirect costs from missed hedges, prompting calls for diversified colocation mandates among exchange members.
CyrusOne’s swift remediation aligns with broader sector shifts toward liquid immersion cooling and edge-distributed architectures. The company operates 50 facilities across North America, Europe, and Asia, with CHI1 serving as a Tier 3-rated hub for low-latency trading. Post-incident, occupancy rates stabilized at 92%, buoyed by contracts with high-frequency firms requiring sub-millisecond latencies.
As data centers consume 2% of global electricity—projected to reach 8% by 2030 per IEA forecasts—such failures highlight the fragility of centralized infrastructure. CyrusOne’s enhancements position it competitively, but the event accelerates adoption of hybrid cooling models blending air, liquid, and free-cooling methods. For financial markets, it reinforces the need for multi-site redundancy, with exchanges like ICE and Eurex piloting geo-diverse failover systems in 2025 trials.
