5 things to know before the stock market opens Tuesday

Here are the most important news, trends and analysis that investors need to start their trading day:

U.S. oil prices, as measured by West Texas Intermediate crude, rose modestly Tuesday morning to around seven-year highs near $78 per barrel. WTI jumped roughly 2.3% on Monday as international oil producers decided to keep a cap on supplies. Despite pressure from the U.S. to ramp up output, OPEC and its allies were concerned that a fourth global wave of Covid infections could slow a demand recovery, a source told Reuters just before Monday’s vote. U.S. oil prices have surged more than 60% in 2021, bringing major energy companies along for the ride. Exxon has gained nearly 50% this year.

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen is set to testify at Tuesday’s hearing of the Senate Commerce subcommittee on consumer protection. After recent reports in The Wall Street Journal based on documents she leaked raised a public outcry, Haugen revealed her identity in an interview on the CBS program “60 Minutes,” which aired Sunday night. She insisted that “Facebook, over and over again, has shown it chooses profit over safety.” Shares of Facebook rose 1% in Tuesday’s premarket after closing down almost 5% in their worst session in nearly a year.

Facebook and its Instagram and WhatsApp services are back online after a massive global outage. Facebook said late Monday that “the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change.” The roughly six-hour incident marked the longest stretch of downtime for the social media company since 2008, when a bug knocked the site offline for about a day, affecting around 80 million users. The company’s platforms currently have billions users.

A San Francisco federal court decided that Tesla must pay a former contract worker, Owen Diaz, around $137 million after he endured racist abuse working for the company, his attorneys told CNBC. The jury awarded more than attorneys had asked for their client, including $130 million in punitive damages and $6.9 million for emotional distress. Diaz told the court that colleagues used epithets to denigrate him and other Black workers, telling him to “go back to Africa” and leaving racist graffiti in the restrooms and a racist drawing in his workspace. Diaz’s lawyers said the case was only able to move forward because their client had not signed one of Tesla’s mandatory arbitration agreements.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday is set to visit the Michigan district of a moderate Democratic lawmaker who has urged him to promote his $3.5 trillion budget proposal more aggressively to the public. Back in Washington, negotiations continued on two bills to boost spending on social safety nets and environmental programs as well as infrastructure projects.

Biden on Monday urged Republican senators to “get out of the way” and let Democrats suspend the nation’s debt ceiling, hoping to keep the U.S. government from bumping dangerously close to a credit default. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell has urged Democrats to use their majorities on Capitol Hill to act without GOP votes. Congress faces an Oct. 18 deadline.

— The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report. Follow all the market action like a pro on CNBC Pro. Get the latest on the pandemic with CNBC’s coronavirus coverage.