A major disruption at CME Group in late November exposed a critical dependency within the foreign exchange market, particularly among non-bank market makers, according to a new study released Tuesday by the Swiss National Bank.
The outage, stemming from a failure at a Chicago data center on November 28, knocked out CME Group’s foreign exchange venues for approximately 11 hours. The SNB’s research indicates that currency pairs with active futures contracts traded on CME and where EBS Market – owned by CME – is a primary trading venue, experienced the most significant deterioration in market conditions. Bid-offer spreads widened by as much as eight times during the disruption.
The study specifically highlighted that non-bank market makers were particularly reliant on futures pricing and liquidity during the event. Spreads for these firms blew out by nearly 30 times, the SNB found.
CME Group offers FX futures and options, providing a central pool of liquidity and price transparency, according to the company. The outage underscored the increasing reliance on centralized infrastructure within a traditionally decentralized market structure, the SNB report stated.
The SNB’s findings suggest that the FX market’s functionality is now heavily intertwined with the performance of CME’s platforms. The research was published on February 23, 2026, and is available in English, though not currently in French.
FX Link, CME Group’s cleared liquidity pool for spot-starting forwards, was recently launched, further integrating spot and futures markets. The company also offers FX Spot+, a next-generation, all-to-all spot FX marketplace connected to FX futures liquidity.
