CME Breaks Down Again: And This Time It Happened at the Worst Possible Moment

Thursday, 26/02/2026 | 07:28 GMT by Damian Chmiel

The outage hit on contract expiry day, leaving traders unable to roll positions as gold, copper and natural gas markets went dark.

CME shares fell nearly 2% as confidence in the exchange's systems takes another hit amid record trading volumes.

CME Group's Globex electronic trading platform went dark for gold, copper and natural gas futures on Wednesday afternoon, the second significant breakdown on the exchange's commodity markets within the last few months, and this time it happened on one of the most sensitive days in the trading calendar.

CME's Global Command Center flagged the problem at 12:11 p.m. Central Time. Four minutes later, the exchange confirmed a full trading halt across metals and natural gas futures and options. Natural gas markets came back online at 12:50 p.m., about 50 minutes after they were switched off, with options following 35 minutes into the halt. Metals took considerably longer, with gold and copper contracts on Globex not reopening until around 1:45 p.m.

Bad Timing on Contract Expiry Day

The disruption landed at a particularly sensitive moment. Wednesday was the expiry date for the March natural gas futures contract - the day when traders traditionally roll positions over into the next month. Despite the confusion, gas prices still managed to push higher, ultimately settling up 1.9% at $2.969 per million British thermal units. Whether the halt itself contributed to that move remains unclear.

CME said all standard day orders and good-till-date orders placed for Wednesday were wiped out entirely. Good-till-canceled orders that had already been acknowledged were left in place. The cancellations added operational headaches on top of an already volatile session.

Trading on the competing Intercontinental Exchange was unaffected throughout.

Silver Tests $91 Amid the Chaos

Silver added its own layer of intrigue to Wednesday's session. Prices climbed to their highest levels in three weeks during the day, briefly testing just above $91 per ounce intraday, a level that carries significant technical weight as the upper boundary of February's consolidation range. By the close, however, the metal pulled back to finish the day below $90, failing to confirm the breakout. On Thursday, silver drifted slightly lower again, continuing to trade beneath that key resistance zone.

Whether the Globex outage played any role in those price swings is hard to say with certainty. What is clear is that the halt disrupted normal price discovery in metals markets at precisely the moment silver was making its most technically significant move of the month.

As detailed analysis on FinanceMagnates.com shows, the $90-$91 zone is the gate that determines whether silver's recovery from February's brutal selloff gains real momentum. A daily close above it would open the path toward $100 and beyond, while failure to hold it keeps the metal range-bound.

Confidence Erosion Sets In

The reaction from market participants was pointed. Nicky Shiels, head of metals strategy at MKS PAMP SA, commented for Bloomberg the glitch "erases confidence over liquidity and price discovery at a time when the market has been contending with a market dysfunctioning given the wild price swings."

CME's stock felt the impact too, falling about 4% on the day. The exchange is currently riding record trading volumes: its natural gas complex hit an all-time single-day record of more than 2.5 million contracts on January 20, up 15% from the previous peak set in November 2018. Metals volumes have also surged this year as gold and silver prices rocketed to new highs, driven in part by tariff-related safe-haven buying.

That volume boom has made the reliability question harder to ignore. The exchange earlier this year overhauled how it calculates margins for precious metals, switching from fixed-dollar amounts to a percentage-based system as prices surged to records.

Despite the margin change, metals volumes at CME jumped 18%, with micro silver futures hitting a new daily record of 715,111 contracts.

A Familiar Problem

This was not a one-off. In late January, the New York Mercantile Exchange - owned by CME - imposed an unusual two-minute trading halt during the market close for natural gas, skewing the settlement price and leaving traders dealing with unusually high volatility caused by a wave of cold weather thoroughly confused. And just this month, CME reported delays in publishing metals settlement prices.

The problems go back further still. In November, CME was forced to suspend futures and options trading entirely for several hours after a cooling failure at a CyrusOne data center knocked out systems across foreign exchange, bonds, equities and commodities. That outage left brokers flying blind and forced firms onto internal pricing models.