Reuters, Bloomberg, CNBC contributed to this report.
Brent crude prices barely budged on Friday, but trading in US West Texas Intermediate (WTI) was literally stuck in place after a major system outage at CME Group halted a big chunk of global futures markets.
Traders were left watching a screen full of stale prices just as they were trying to gauge oil, stocks and bond moves ahead of a key OPEC+ meeting and ongoing Russia-Ukraine peace talks.
Front-month Brent crude for January was down just 14 cents, or 0.2%, at $63.20 a barrel by late morning in London, while the more active February contract slipped 7 cents to $62.80.
WTI, on the other hand, was frozen at $59.08 a barrel, up 43 cents from its last print — but unable to move because trading was halted on CME’s Globex platform after a data center problem. There was no settlement on Thursday due to the US Thanksgiving holiday.
Both Brent and WTI are still on track for their fourth straight monthly loss, the longest losing streak since 2023, as worries about rising global supply hang over the market — even though prices are up more than 1% for the week.
Refinery margins outside the usual peak season are helping keep crude demand afloat in some regions, analysts said, but the expectation of an oil surplus is still weighing on prices.
A Reuters survey of 35 economists and analysts now sees Brent averaging $62.23 a barrel in 2026, down from last month’s forecast of $63.15, and well below the roughly $68.80 it has averaged so far in 2025.
Geopolitics hasn’t gone away either. Hopes that a Russia-Ukraine peace deal might be close sent oil sharply lower earlier in the week, but prices have clawed back some ground as negotiations drag on with no concrete breakthrough.
“The market is caught between there being no immediate sanctions relief for Russia, but as slow as negotiations are, there being hope for a future settlement,” said John Evans of PVM Oil Associates.
Traders are also glued to Sunday’s OPEC+ meeting, where the group is widely expected to keep output levels unchanged but agree on a new way to measure members’ maximum production capacity, according to sources familiar with the talks.
Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest crude exporter, is expected to cut its January official selling prices for Asia for a second month in a row, likely taking them to the lowest level in about five years amid ample supply and a looming surplus, sources said.
The bigger drama on Friday wasn’t in the fundamentals — it was in the plumbing of the financial system.
A cooling issue at CyrusOne’s CHI1 data center in the Chicago area knocked out key CME systems, forcing the world’s biggest exchange operator to halt trading in a wide range of futures and options on its Globex platform.
That included:
- WTI crude futures;
- US Treasury futures;
- S&P 500, Nasdaq 100 and Nikkei index futures;
- Gold, palm oil and other commodity contracts;
- EBS’s major FX pairs like euro/dollar and dollar/yen.
Some fixed-income platforms such as BrokerTec US Actives and BrokerTec EU stayed open, but much of the core futures complex was down for hours — one of the longest disruptions in years, traders said.
CyrusOne said its engineers and contractors were working on restoring full cooling capacity, restarting some chillers at limited load and bringing in temporary cooling equipment.
For brokers and traders, the outage meant trying to operate without live benchmark prices.
“It’s just a pain in the arse, to be honest,” said Christopher Forbes of CMC Markets, who said he hadn’t seen a failure this widespread in two decades.
CMC pulled trading in several commodities and was forced to rely on internal models and alternative data to price others, adding:
“We’re now taking a lot of unnecessary risk here to continue pricing.”
Others warned that once markets fully reopen, there could be a burst of volatility as prices catch up after hours of forced downtime.
CME’s own shares slipped around 0.7% in premarket trade during the disruption.
US Treasury yields were little changed, with the 10-year note hovering just under 4% and moves across the curve limited to a few basis points as the technical outage overshadowed a light economic calendar.
With US markets already thin after Thanksgiving and many traders looking ahead to next week’s key PCE inflation data and the Federal Reserve’s December rate decision, Friday was meant to be relatively calm.
Instead, a cooling system glitch turned it into a reminder of how dependent modern markets are on a handful of massive data centers — and how quickly things can freeze when one of them goes down.
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