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Black Friday trading carried an odd mix of holiday calm and technical drama as the S&P 500 tracker VOO moved higher despite a temporary halt on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Futures trading was briefly suspended after a cooling problem at a Chicago data center interrupted order flow, yet equities showed resilience in early sessions. Traders shrugged off the glitch and kept the market tone mildly positive heading into a shortened trading day.
Early Friday, the CME Group experienced an outage that regulators and market participants traced to infrastructure rather than a cyberattack or grid failure. Reports noted “a cooling issue at CyrusOne data centers,” and that description quickly spread through trading desks monitoring the situation. For high-frequency and derivatives markets, any interruption at key data centers is a headline-grabbing event, and this one forced a complete pause in certain futures markets.
The exchange itself clarified the cause with an explicit operational note: “On November 27, our CHI1 facility experienced a chiller plant failure affecting multiple cooling units.” That line matters because it narrows the problem to environmental control systems inside a facility, not a loss of electrical service or broader transmission issues. Fixing chillers is a physical, mechanical job, which explains why the exchange focused on bringing temporary systems in and restarting equipment carefully.
Technicians and engineers were able to bring systems back online in stages, restarting “several chillers at limited capacity” and deploying “temporary cooling equipment to supplement our permanent systems.” Those exact phrases were used by the company while it coordinated the recovery, and they underline how exchanges rely on redundancy in their physical infrastructure. By mid-morning the markets that had been halted were showing normal trading activity again, with clocks on desks blinking back into sync.
The market reaction was muted but positive. Vanguard S&P 500 ETF VOO was trading up roughly 0.3% in early premarket action, and the broad market trend stayed constructive despite the scare. Traders still had to remember that today is a shortened session with an early 1 p.m. ET close for Black Friday, so positioning was conservative and volume leaned light compared with an ordinary Friday.
Beyond the data center incident, corporate news was sparse as many companies sit out the holiday week. A few smaller names still planned earnings calls after the market close, and attention drifted to those results as a gauge of consumer spending and enterprise resilience. One example on the calendar was Spire Global, which operates small satellites used for maritime and weather data and opted to release results late in the day.
Spire Global’s numbers were expected to show continued pressure, with analysts penciling in a loss narrowing to $0.33 per share and revenue slipping roughly 26% to $21.2 million. Those forecasts reflect the tougher macro backdrop for niche space services and the ongoing capital intensity of satellite operations. Traders tend to treat these smaller reports as incremental signals rather than market-moving events, but they do matter for sector sentiment.
In analyst land, there was noise around larger satellite operators as well. A JPMorgan analyst moved Eutelsat Communications SA to neutral with a EUR1.90 price target, noting the stock’s steep decline from previous levels and suggesting limited downside remains. That call came after the stock had fallen roughly 80% since the broker’s last public stance, and it illustrates how beaten-down names can attract cautious upgrades when their downside appears constrained.
What this episode highlights is how fragile parts of market plumbing really are, and how quickly contingencies kick in when something in that plumbing fails. Exchanges and data centers maintain multiple layers of backup, but a chiller failure shows that even seemingly mundane systems can cascade into big operational headaches. Expect firms and regulators to revisit redundancy and response playbooks, because the next test might not be a software bug but a broken pipe or an AC unit that won’t start.
