Chevron offers rival drillers its chemical technology to boost shale oil output - Reuters

The total number of active drilling rigs for oil and gas in the United States remained unchanged this week, according to new data that Baker Hughes published on Friday, with the total rig count in the US staying at 603, up 55 from this same time last year. The number of active oil rigs fell by 3, to 459 during the latest reporting period, according to the data. This is 41 above this same time last year. The number of gas rigs rose by 1 to 133, which is 12 more than this time last year. Miscellaneous rigs rose by 2 to 11. The latest EIA data showed that weekly U. S. crude oil production fell during week ending October 9. US crude oil production averaged 13.679 million bpd during the reporting period, down from 13.979 million bpd last week and up just 43,000 bpd from a year ago. Primary Vision’s Frac Spread Count, an estimate of the number of crews completing wells, rose again during the week ending October 9—the fifth gain in as many weeks, and up 7 crews from the week prior at 203. The number of active drilling rigs in the Permian Basin fell by 2 during the reporting period, to 272. This is 21 rigs above year-ago levels.

Here’s your NYT Strands hint for today, plus the spangram and all of today’s Strands answers for puzzle No. 959 on Sunday, Oct. 18, 2026. Today’s Strands theme was tricky. It helps to be a runner. Read on for all the answers.

A supply-chain attack involving ConnectWise’s cloud services has exposed Microsoft 365 customers to unauthorized application access, with researchers reporting successful sign-ins across 173 partner and customer tenants. The incident centres on credentials associated with ConnectWise Cloud Backup, formerly SkyKick, and raises concerns about attackers exploiting permissions already entrusted to business software. ConnectWise has confirmed unauthorized access to application identities within its Cloud Backup environment. In an October 17 update on its service-status page, the company said it was shutting off application access, interrupting customer backups while investigation and remediation continued.