American flags are displayed on screens on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, U.S., September 22, 2025. REUTERS/Jeenah Moon

By Johann M Cherian and Pranav Kashyap

(Reuters) -U.S. stock index futures were frozen on Friday after an outage at CME Group brought trading in currencies, commodities and equities futures to a standstill around the world, 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 Thursday on its website and said the problem was a cooling issue at its CyrusOne data centers.

CME's stock futures offerings linked to the S&P 500, the Nasdaq 100 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average are typically heavily traded before U.S. markets open, with investors relying on them to gauge trends and directions. All of them showed their last trade at 9:44 p.m. ET on November 27.

"It's a black eye to the CME and probably an overdue reminder of the importance of market structure and how interconnected all these are. It's month end, a lot of things get rebalanced today," said Ben Laidler, head of equity strategy at Bradesco BBI.

"Having said that, it could have been a lot worse, it'll be a very low volume day. If you're going to have it, there would have been worse days to have a breakdown like this."

Market volumes are expected to be light following the Thanksgiving holiday. 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 0.26% and Invesco's QQQ Trust tracking the Nasdaq climbed 0.42%, while a fund tracking the blue-chip Dow edged up 0.27% with light trading volumes.

Traders warned of a potential spike in volatility once the outage is resolved, a situation likely to be worsened by low liquidity during the holiday-shortened trading week. Markets will close at 1 p.m. ET.

While index futures were halted, shares of U.S.-listed companies appeared to be trading normally in premarket trading.

Shares of CME Group were down about 0.5% in light volumes.

RETAILERS IN FOCUS AS HOLIDAY SHOPPING KICKS OFF

This week also kicked off the holiday shopping season, starting with Thanksgiving on Thursday, Black Friday and Cyber Monday - crucial days of sales for big-box retailers.

Online sales on Thursday alone are expected to rise 6% from last year's level to reach $8.6 billion, data from Salesforce showed, as retailers offer steep discounts to lure shoppers amid tariff woes and a slew of corporate layoffs.

Retail giant Walmart was marginally higher, while Amazon.com rose 1%. Other consumer-related companies such as Nike and Coty were up between 0.3% and 0.6%.

Wall Street was also heading into the last trading session of the month, which was marked by worries about an AI bubble as valuations get stretched and tech behemoths spend billions to scale up infrastructure.

DECEMBER FED RATE CUT BETS RISE

Traders also struggled to gauge the Federal Reserve's next monetary policy move as they took stock of a barrage of delayed government data and mixed views by policymakers on interest rates.

However, dovish remarks in recent weeks from some influential Fed officials doubled the bets of a 25-basis-point rate cut in December to 84.7%, according to the CME Group's FedWatch Tool.

The S&P 500 and the Dow are poised for their steepest monthly declines since April and the Nasdaq its biggest since March.

(Reporting by Johann M Cherian, Shashwat Chauhan, Purvi Agarwal in Bengaluru; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty and Maju Samuel)