A cooling‑system failure at a CyrusOne data‑center in Aurora, Illinois, caused a multi‑hour outage at CME Group, halting global derivatives trading and exposing concentration risks in critical digital infrastructure. The outage—reported after intense temperature spikes inside the facility—forced CME to delay a switchover and created trading interruptions from Tokyo to New York. For higher education, the event is a warning about single‑point failures in research and campus IT: university HPC clusters, cloud dependencies and institutional backups must be stress‑tested against vendor outages. The incident raises questions about contingency planning, vendor SLAs, and the resilience of cloud and colo providers that host research, learning platforms and administrative systems.