CME Group’s hours-long outage on Friday — freezing trading across FX, commodities, Treasuries and equity futures — was one of the longest in years. Electronic markets have faced repeated disruptions over the past decade, from software bugs to cyberattacks and even animals damaging equipment.
Historic Outages That Shook Global Markets
- Aug 2024 – Moscow Exchange: Stock trading halted for 1+ hour.
- Jul 2024 – SIX Switzerland: One of the worst outages in years; equities, bonds & funds halted twice.
- Jun 2024 – NYSE glitch: Massive swings in Berkshire Hathaway & Barrick; dozens halted.
- Oct 2023 – London Stock Exchange: Small-cap trading suspended.
- Nov 2020 – ASX Australia: Market halted 20 minutes after open; trading resumed next day.
- Oct 2020 – Tokyo Stock Exchange: Worst outage ever; full-day halt due to hardware failure.
- Aug 2020 – NZX: 4 days of disruptions from cyberattacks.
- Feb 2020 – TMX Canada: Shutdown across 3 exchanges for nearly 2 hours.
- 2015–2019 (NYSE, Nasdaq, SGX, HKEX): Multiple outages from software bugs & connectivity failures.
- May 2012 – Facebook IPO: Nasdaq tech failure caused hours of uncertainty & major losses.
- May 2010 – Flash Crash: Dow plunged 1,000 points, erasing nearly $1 trillion temporarily.
- 1994 & 1987 – Nasdaq: Outages caused… by squirrels chewing power cables.
Why It Matters
Frequent outages highlight the fragility of global electronic markets — where milliseconds matter — and why resilience, redundancy, and cybersecurity remain top priorities for exchanges and regulators worldwide.