KUALA LUMPUR: An outage that took down markets operated by CME Group Inc for more than 10 hours at the end of last week was caused by human error at a data centre owned by CyrusOne.
Onsite staff and contractors at the data centre that serves CME in Aurora, Illinois, failed to follow standard procedures for draining cooling towers ahead of freezing temperatures, a spokesperson for CyrusOne said in a statement to Bloomberg News.
The data centre serves as the hub for the CME, one of the world’s largest derivatives exchanges, which handles trillions of dollars each day across equity, currency, bond and commodity markets globally. CME’s markets were down for more than 10 hours during the catastrophic outage.
CyrusOne said it has since updated its procedures for cold weather, including boosting onsite engineers and hardening its infrastructure.
The outage underscored risks associated with the CME’s reliance on a data centre it sold in 2016 to CyrusOne, a company now owned by KKR & Co and Global Infrastructure Partners. CME also opted against switching to a backup system as called for in its disaster recovery plans. —Bloomberg
