A major disruption to foreign exchange markets last November underscored a critical dependency on CME Group’s futures pricing and liquidity, particularly among non-bank market makers, according to a new study released Tuesday by the Swiss National Bank.
The study examined the fallout from the November 28 outage, which saw CME Group’s foreign exchange venues knocked offline for approximately 11 hours following a failure at a Chicago data center. Researchers found that currency pairs with actively traded futures contracts on the CME, and those primarily traded on CME-owned EBS Market, experienced the most significant deterioration in market conditions.
Bid-offer spreads widened substantially during the disruption. The EUR/USD pair, a key benchmark in global currency markets, saw spreads increase eightfold. More dramatically, spreads for non-bank principal trading firms (PTFs) blew out by nearly 30 times, the SNB report revealed.
The findings highlight the extent to which these firms rely on the price discovery and liquidity provided by CME futures contracts when primary trading venues are unavailable. The SNB’s research suggests that the outage exposed vulnerabilities in a decentralized market structure increasingly reliant on centralized infrastructure.
CME Group offers FX futures and options, providing a central pool of liquidity and price transparency, according to the company’s website. These instruments are designed to offer capital and margin efficiencies, and are centrally cleared to virtually eliminate default risk. The company also promotes its FX Link, described as a cleared liquidity pool for spot-starting forwards.
The November outage wasn’t limited to FX markets. A report from Bloomberg News at the time indicated that trading in futures and options across equities, bonds, and commodities was also halted due to the data center fault.
The SNB study, published February 23, 2026, does not offer recommendations for mitigating the risks identified. Further research is planned to assess the resilience of decentralized markets in the face of similar disruptions, according to the report’s authors, Vincent Barthe, Lukas Frei, and Thomas Maag.