Stock markets were little changed Friday, capping a solid week driven by expectations of more US rate cuts, with trading thinned by the Thanksgiving holiday and a data centre outage.

Trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, one of the world's major trading operators, was halted by a technical outage first reported at 0240 GMT Friday.

"Due to a cooling issue at CyrusOne data centers, our markets are currently halted," the CME said in a statement.

Market participants rely heavily on CME platforms to manage risk through futures contracts tied, for example, to stock indices, interest rates and currencies.

The outage also froze pricing on the US benchmark crude contract, WTI, for several hours.

"It's been a while since we’ve had such a long outage," said Neil Wilson, UK investor strateg

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