(Reuters) -U.S. stock index futures were frozen on Friday after a data outage at CME Group brought trading to a standstill in futures across currencies, commodities, Treasuries and stocks, leaving investors
flying blind ahead of a shortened trading session.
CME, the world's largest exchange operator, first posted about the outages at 9:40 p.m. ET on its website and said the problem was a cooling issue its CyrusOne data centers.
CME's products include S&P 500 futures, Nasdaq 100 futures and Dow futures, all of which showed their last trade at 09:44 p.m. ET on Nov 27.
"At the moment it's more frustration. As long as the resolution is in place within the next couple of hours, I would have thought it was going to have limited impact if any to our business at this point in time," said Christopher Peters, head of trading at Accendo Markets in London.
Market volumes were expected to be light following the Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday. Investors instead looked to exchange traded funds tracking Wall Street's main indexes as a gauge for broader market mood.
In premarket trading, SPDR's S&P 500 ETF was up 0.3% and Invesco's QQQ Trust tracking the Nasdaq climbed 0.4%, while a fund tracking the blue-chip Dow edged up 0.3% with light trading volumes.
While index futures were frozen, shares of U.S.-listed companies also appeared to be trading normally in premarket trading.
Shares of CME Group were down about 0.7% in light volumes.
(Reporting by Johann M Cherian and Shashwat Chauhan in Bengaluru; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)
