ICE continues to work to correct this morning's issues, however they have now stated the ETA of the fix to be between 12:15pm and 12:30pm EDT.
No, but I sometimes trade WTI and I would be PISSED right now with this move in crude. Luckily I am using NYMEX today. I had an outage awhile ago trading in WTI and that was enough for me. I would now rather have ICE as a backup to NYMEX than the other way around.
You are kinda screwed in the short term. If you have access to trade international futures markets like LIFFE you can hedge some commodities in a pinch, but what a pain. The postmortem on this outage should be interesting.
if you have an open position that is halted and then when it opens it gaps against you, do you have any recourse?
Yeah, the exchange is not liable for losses due to technical glitches usually. I've been reimbursed from my broker for bad fills in individual products before but I had to jump through hoops to get any money out of them. With a major outage like this though they will throw the exchange risk disclosure agreement in your face. This is the risk of electronic trading unfortunately. It does have it's downside.