CME Trading Glitch Disrupts Global Markets, Black Friday Sets New High, U.S. Futures Slip, and TSMC Targets Ex-Executive in Trade-Secret Suit

1st December 2025

Global markets were left blinking on Friday after a rare CME outage froze trading across futures tied to stocks, bonds, commodities, and currencies for more than eleven hours, underscoring just how fragile the world’s financial plumbing can be. Meanwhile, American consumers went in the opposite direction, shattering online spending records with an $11.8 billion Black Friday surge as AI-driven shopping tools reshape how people hunt for deals. Back on Wall Street, U.S. stock futures pulled back as investors took profits after a turbulent November rally, while fresh data shows markets are still wrestling with oil swings, crypto volatility, and the countdown to the Fed’s December meeting. And on the corporate front, tensions spiked in the semiconductor world as TSMC sued a former senior executive who jumped to Intel, igniting a high-stakes legal battle over trade secrets in the race to dominate advanced chips. All this and more in today’s Read It And Eat!

Major Headlines

• Global futures reopen after exchange operator CME suffers multi-hour disruption

Global futures markets were disrupted for several hours on Friday after CME Group, the world's largest exchange operator, suffered one of its longest outages in years, halting trading across stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies. By 1335 GMT, trading in foreign exchange, stock and bond futures,as well as other products had resumed, after having been knocked out for over 11 hours, according to LSEG data. 

CME blamed the outage on a cooling failure at data centres run by CyrusOne, which said its Chicago-area facility had affected services for customers including CME (CME.O), The disruption stopped trading in major currency pairs on CME's EBS platform, as well as benchmark futures for West Texas Intermediate crude , Nasdaq 100 , Nikkei , palm oil and gold , according to LSEG data. Trading volumes have been thinned out this week by the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday and with dealers looking to close positions for the end of the month, the outage posed a risk of spurring volatility, market participants said.

"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," Ben Laidler, head of equity strategy at Bradesco BBI, said. "We complacently take for granted much of the timing is frankly not great. It's month end, a lot of things get rebalanced." Still, the timing of Friday's outage, during a shortened U.S. equity trading session with thinner volumes, helped limit its market impact. "If there was to be a glitch day, today's probably a good day to have it," Joe Saluzzi, co-manager of trading at Themis Trading in Chatham, New Jersey, said. Futures are a mainstay of financial markets and are used by dealers, speculators and businesses wishing to hedge or hold positions in a wide range of underlying assets. Without these and other instruments, brokers were left flying blind and many were reluctant to trade contracts with no live prices for hours on end.

A few European brokerages said earlier in the day they had been unable to offer trading in some products on certain futures contracts. "My anticipation is that life goes on but everybody will have yet another look at their data centre arrangements and invest more in ensuring reliable supply because the importance of data center uptime is higher and higher," Mikhail Zverev, Portfolio Manager at Amati Global Investors in London. Regulators are tracking the situation, with both the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission confirming they are aware of the issue and conducting ongoing surveillance. Reuters

• Black Friday sets online spending record of $11.8B, Adobe says

  
  

 American consumers spent $11.8 billion online on Black Friday, according to data from Adobe Analytics, which says it tracks more than 1 trillion visits to U.S. retail websites. That’s a new record, and up from $10.8 billion spent on Black Friday last year, Adobe says. Between 10am and 2pm, online shoppers were supposedly spending $12.5 million every minute. Forbes reports that Adobe said in a statement that the numbers show Black Friday has become “a major e-commerce moment, as more shoppers opt to stay home and take advantage of deals.” 

The company projects that Cyber Monday (coming in two days, on December 1) will be even bigger, with $14.2 billion spent online, according to Reuters. Black Friday data from companies like Adobe and Salesforce can provide an early indicator of broader holiday shopping trends. Adobe is projecting a total of $253.4 billion in holiday spending this year, compared to $241.1 billion in 2024.Salesforce said it tracked $79 billion in global spending on Black Friday, with $18 billion of that in the United States, year-over-year increases of 6% and 3%, respectively. But this growth may have less to do with increased consumer demand and instead reflecting higher prices, Salesforce data also shows that prices were up an average of 7%, while order volumes were down 1%.

And both Adobe and Salesforce claim to see a growing influence of AI on holiday shopping. For example, Salesforce said that between Thanksgiving and Black Friday, AI and AI agents influenced $22 billion in global sales, though it’s not clear how broadly that’s defined. The data is less clear about how online trends compare to in-person shopping at brick-and-mortar stores, with RetailNext telling Forbes that in-store traffic appears to be down 3.4% nationwide, while Pass_by said foot traffic is up 1.17% overall, and up an even more impressive 7.9% in department stores. TechCrunch 

• U.S. stock futures dip after last week’s rally capped a rocky November

U.S. stock futures retreated on Sunday, as investors took profits after markets rallied last week to close out a volatile November. After slight initial gains, Dow Jones Industrial Average features  YM00 -0.40% were last down about 200 points, or 0.4%, while S&P 500 futures ES00 -0.52% declined 0.7% and Nasdaq-100 futures  NQ00 -0.67%  sank 0.9%. Crude oil prices CL.1 +1.98% advanced after OPEC+ on Sunday reaffirmed its previously announced plan to pause output hikes through the first quarter of 2026, amid growing concerns of a coming surplus in the global oil supply. 

The price of West Texas intermediate crude has fallen more than 18% year to date after a series of production boosts by the OPEC+ nations this year. Bitcoin BTCUSD -4.95%, sank more than 5%, below the $87,000 level, giving up a 2.5% rally over the previous five days; it’s down more than 18% over the past month. Gold futures GC00 +0.59% edged higher, while silver futures SI00 +1.07% touched a 52-week high. Preliminary data showed shoppers were out in force for Black Friday sales, with a record $11.8 billion spent online Friday, according to Adobe Analytics, up 9% from last year.

But while that data may appear encouraging for retail stocks. In an abbreviated trading session Friday, stocks rallied to end the month with a five-session winning streak, their best Thanksgiving-week performance since 2008. The S&P 500 SPX +0.54%  gained 3.7% last week and the Dow DJIA +0.61% rose 3.2%. That may be good news for December; according to Dow Jones Market Data, when the S&P 500 has gained more than 2% during Thanksgiving week, the index has posted December gains 80% of the time, going back to 1950. The Dow and S&P 500 gained for the seventh straight month, while the Nasdaq COMP +0.65% fell 1.5% in November, snapping a seven-month winning streak, as AI stocks sold off amid fears of a bubble. Investors will be focused on the upcoming Fed meeting Dec. 9-10, widely expecting another interest-rate cut.

As of Sunday, CMS’s FedWatch tool gave an 87% chance of a cut at that meeting. In November, “markets collectively shrugged off AI valuation alarms, government shutdown anxiety, and mid-month growth scares and instead rediscovered the comfort blanket” of likely Fed easing, Stephen Innes, managing partner at SPI Asset Management, wrote in a weekend note. “There’s still a caveat hanging over the door,” he added. “Fed cutting cycles aren’t always bullish. If labor softening morphs into real deterioration, the policy mix shifts from normalization to triage, and equities historically don’t enjoy the view from that room. But we’re not there yet.”   MarketWatch

• TSMC Sues Ex-Executive Over Move to Join Intel

  
  

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. sued a former executive who left to work for Intel Corp., saying there is a high likelihood that he leaked trade secrets from the world’s most advanced chipmaker to his new employer. TSMC said it filed the lawsuit against Lo Wei-jen, a former senior vice president, on Tuesday at the Intellectual Property and Commercial Court in Taiwan. It said the legal action was based on a non-compete agreement that Lo had signed during his employment. A spokesperson for the court confirmed it received a lawsuit from TSMC on Tuesday.

The unusual action from TSMC underscores the growing sensitivities around cutting-edge chip technology, which anchors not just the company’s leading global position but also Taiwan’s own geopolitical dynamic. The company regularly loses employees to competitors and other firms in the supply chain, but rarely of Lo’s standing and seniority. “There is a high probability that Lo uses, leaks, discloses, delivers, or transfers TSMC’s trade secrets and confidential information to Intel, thus making legal actions (including claiming damages for breach of contract) necessary,” TSMC said in a statement. Intel rejected the allegations. “Based on everything we know, we have no reason to believe there is any merit to the allegations involving Mr. Lo,” an Intel spokesperson said Wednesday in a statement. “Intel maintains rigorous policies and controls that strictly prohibit the use or transfer of any third-part confidential information or intellectual property.”

Lo, 75, was at one point in charge of research and technology development at TSMC and played a key role in facilitating the mass production of cutting-edge chips, including those used to make AI accelerators. After a tenure spanning more than two decades, Lo left TSMC in July. The company said Lo had failed to disclose in his exit interview that he was planning to work for Intel, telling company lawyers he would join an academic institution.

 Before he joined TSMC in 2004, Lo was employed at Intel focusing on advanced technology development, including running a chip factory in Santa Clara, California. Intel said Wednesday that Lo worked for 18 years as part of the process technology team at the company.

Talent moving between companies is a healthy part of the industry, the Intel spokesperson said in the statement, and the company welcomes Lo back.

Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs said in a statement that it will closely monitor the potential impact on the chip industry and it will collaborate with local prosecutors on an investigation into whether the case may have violated a national security law. Local prosecutors have started looking into the reports to see whether any person broke any law after local media reported last week that Lo had taken proprietary knowhow from his former employer just before his departure.  Yahoo.Finance

Minor Headlines 

• Trump Declares Venezuelan Airspace Closed New York Times 

  
  

• Canada's third-quarter annualized GDP surprises with growth of 2.6% Reuters

  
  

• Today  marks  the 20th anniversary of Cyber Monday Technical.ly

  
  

• Switzerland set to reject 50% inheritance tax on the ultra-rich MSN

  
  

• JPMorgan to build multi-billion pound tower in London's Canary Wharf Reuters

  
  

• China blocked TikTok-owner ByteDance from using Nvidia chips Reuters 

  
  

• Trump has made his choice for Fed chair Bloomberg 

  
  

• Accenture dubs its 800,000 staff ‘reinventors’ as it adapts to AI Financial Times