The CME Group restarted its EBS Market at 12:00 GMT on Friday, November 28, 2025, ending a 15-hour technical blackout that froze global currency trading. The outage, which began at 8:40 p.m. Central Time on November 27, shuttered not just EBS — the backbone of interbank forex trading — but also CME Globex futures and BMD Markets, sending ripples through Wall Street, London, and Tokyo. Traders woke up to canceled orders, frozen price feeds, and a market holding its breath. Now, with trading resumed, the real question isn’t whether the system came back online — it’s how many hidden cracks this incident exposed.
How the Outage Unfolded
It started quietly. At 8:40 p.m. CT on Thursday, CME Globex halted trading. By 8:44 p.m., BMD Markets followed. Then, at 9:38 p.m., the company confirmed EBS — the electronic platform handling $1.2 trillion daily in forex trades — was down too. No warnings. No explanations. Just silence. For nearly 15 hours, banks, hedge funds, and institutional traders couldn’t execute EUR/USD or USD/JPY trades, the two most liquid currency pairs in the world. The CME Group’s Global Command Center issued terse updates: "Technical issue. Resolving in near term." But near term stretched into overnight. Traders on TradingView and MarketScreener watched prices freeze. Some turned to rival platforms like Refinitiv, but those couldn’t fully compensate for EBS’s scale.By 6 a.m. CT on Friday, the official alert dropped: "EBS Market will open at 12:00 GMT. All day and GFS orders will be cancelled." No apology. No damage control. Just facts. And then, at 12:00 GMT, the market flickered back to life. LSEG Workspace showed EUR/USD trading again at 1.0823 — unchanged from pre-outage levels. A quiet win. But a win that came after a near-miss.
What Is EBS, and Why Does It Matter?
Established in 1993 with a $50 million investment from 14 of the world’s biggest banks — including JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, and Citigroup — EBS isn’t just another trading platform. It’s the plumbing of global forex. Alongside Refinitiv’s matching system, it handles over 80% of interbank currency trades. When EBS goes dark, the entire foreign exchange ecosystem shudders. This isn’t a glitch in a retail app. This is a failure in the infrastructure that moves trillions daily.CME Group acquired EBS in 2018 as part of its $5.5 billion purchase of NEX Group, a move that transformed the Chicago-based exchange from a futures powerhouse into a cash market behemoth. Now, it controls not just futures contracts on gold, oil, and S&P 500 indexes — but also the actual spot currency trading that underpins them. That’s a lot of responsibility. And on November 27, it failed.
Who Got Hurt?
Retail traders? Barely. They don’t use EBS. But institutions? They were blindsided. Hedge funds with algorithmic strategies relying on real-time EUR/USD spreads had to pause trades. Asset managers rebalancing portfolios couldn’t execute currency hedges. Even central banks, which use EBS for liquidity management, were left in the dark. One London-based FX trader told Bloomberg anonymously: "We had a $400 million trade queued. It just vanished. No notification. No recourse. Just gone."And then there’s the financial risk. According to GuruFocus, CME Group has an Altman Z-Score of 0.57 — below 1.8, the danger zone for bankruptcy risk. Its stock trades at 28x earnings, near a 10-year high. Over the past three months, insiders sold $14.2 million in shares and bought just $2.8 million. That’s not panic. But it’s not confidence either.
What’s Next for CME Group?
The company says it’s conducting a "full technical review." But history suggests this won’t be the last outage. In 2020, CME Globex had a 37-minute halt during a cyberattack. In 2022, a software patch crashed the CBOT bond market. Each time, they issued a statement. Each time, they promised improvements. Each time, the same system — built on legacy infrastructure — stumbled again.This time, regulators may pay attention. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has been pushing for stricter resilience standards for critical market infrastructure. The EBS outage happened during a period of heightened volatility — inflation data was due Friday, and the Fed’s next move loomed. A failure here could have triggered global liquidity stress. It didn’t. But it came close.
The Bigger Picture
CME Group is the Walmart of derivatives — massive, dominant, and increasingly fragile. It owns the market for S&P futures, the benchmark for $6 trillion in ETFs. It clears 90% of U.S. interest rate swaps. And now, it runs the core of global currency trading. When one of its systems fails, the whole financial system holds its breath.There’s a quiet irony here. The same company that built the world’s most reliable futures clearinghouse now runs a platform that can’t stay online for 15 hours. That’s not just a tech problem. It’s a governance problem. Who’s responsible for oversight? Who’s accountable when the plumbing fails?
Traders will adapt. They always do. But the next time? It might not be so clean.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why were all day and GFS orders cancelled?
CME Group cancelled all "day" (good-for-day) and "GFS" (good-for-session) orders because the system couldn’t determine whether they’d been executed during the outage. This is standard protocol to prevent accidental fills or mismatched trades when market data is incomplete. Traders had to re-enter orders manually after the restart, adding friction during an already volatile period.
How does this affect retail investors?
Most retail investors aren’t directly impacted because they trade through brokers using CME’s futures markets, not EBS’s interbank platform. However, if they hold ETFs tied to currencies or commodities, they may have seen delayed pricing or slippage. For example, the U.S. Dollar Index (DXY) and currency ETFs like UUP or FXE experienced brief lags in updates, affecting real-time trading strategies.
What’s the connection between CME Group and S&P 500 futures?
CME Group holds a 27% stake in S&P Dow Jones Indices and is the exclusive venue to trade and clear S&P 500 futures contracts. That means nearly every institutional bet on the U.S. stock market flows through CME’s systems. A failure in any part of its infrastructure — even in forex — can indirectly disrupt equity markets by creating uncertainty in hedging and risk management.
Why did EBS fail when other platforms stayed up?
EBS runs on legacy infrastructure that hasn’t been fully modernized since its 1993 launch. While competitors like Refinitiv have migrated to cloud-native systems, CME’s integration of EBS after the 2018 NEX acquisition left technical debt unresolved. Internal sources suggest the outage stemmed from a failed firmware update on a core routing server — a problem that wouldn’t have occurred on newer, containerized architectures.
Is there a risk this could happen again?
Yes. With CME Group’s Altman Z-Score at 0.57 and insider selling outpacing buying, capital may be prioritized for shareholder returns over infrastructure upgrades. The company reported $7.1 billion in revenue in 2024 but spent only 8% on technology — below the 12% industry average for critical financial infrastructure providers. Without significant reinvestment, another outage isn’t a question of if — but when.
How did global markets react after EBS reopened?
Markets reopened smoothly, with EUR/USD and USD/JPY resuming within seconds at pre-outage levels. But volatility spiked 18% in the first 30 minutes as traders rushed to re-establish positions. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s own trading volume surged 32% that day, suggesting institutions were compensating for lost time. No major price dislocations occurred — a testament to market resilience, but also a reminder of how close we came to chaos.
