CME reports S&P 500 and U.S. Treasuries futures markets outage

One of the largest exchanges reported an outage impacting one of the largest corners of Wall Street.

Chicago-based CME Group Tuesday evening reported a technical issue that resulted in the suspension of futures markets in U.S. Treasuries and the S&P 500 Index, according to a tweet. 

As reported by Bloomberg News, the issue has impacted markets ranging from crude oil to eurodollars. "No trades have happened in U.S. stock-index futures since 8:40 a.m. in Singapore, according to data compiled by Bloomberg," the report noted. 

"CME Group has identified the technical issue and is working to resolve it," a spokeswoman for the exchange said in an email to The Block. "When the iLink gateways are restarted they will be in the normal primary/backup configuration."

"We will publish the pre-open and opening times shortly," the spokeswoman added.

Shortly after 10:00 p.m. ET, the firm provided a status update: "All markets on CME Globex will preopen at 09:15 PM CT and open at 09:45 PM CT. BMD markets will pre-open at 09:15 PM CT and open at 09:30 PM CT. All day and session orders including GTDs with today's date will be canceled. All GTCs that have been acknowledged will remain working." 

Joe Saluzzi, cofounder of institutional broker Themis Trading, noted that such outages are uncommon but not unheard of.

"We've seen them before in the stock market. Usually some sort of equipment failure or software upgrade." Still, he noted CME's dominance in futures makes this incident unique.

"In stock markets, if one exchange goes down, others can keep trading. However there's no such redundancy with other exchanges for S&P futures," Saluzzi added.

One trader told The Block he thinks the outage is tied to a recent software change. "I think it's related to stupid change made over the weekend," he said. "They do infra and software work every weekend."

CME, notably, was one of the first markets in the U.S. to support bitcoin futures.