The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), the world’s leading financial derivatives marketplace, experienced a significant disruption, halting trading for approximately 10 hours on Thursday evening and into Friday morning. This unexpected shutdown drew considerable public outcry from traders, causing confusion and impacting market activity. The CME attributed the halt to a technical issue at the CyrusOne data center in Illinois. While the exchange restored service by afternoon Friday, the outage caused delays and disruptions for traders, leading to concerns about potential manipulation claims. Notably, some traders expressed suspicion that the timing of the suspension coincided with significant trading activity on the platform.