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Microsoft shares fall nearly 3% in pre-market as global outage hits Outlook, Teams and Copilot; what went wrong?

By · Published by Everything Blog

In short

The widespread technical disruption interrupted operations across more than 70 countries and territories for over 12 hours. Engineers linked the failure to unexpected automated health check breakdowns that overwhelmed surviving servers, ruling out any external cyberattack. This extended downtime triggered significant functional chaos for international public agencies and commercial entities worldwide. Early attempts to restore functionality faltered because of severe traffic-management imbalances before broader remedies stabilized the platform.

Key points

  • Infrastructure strain occurred after several servers failed automated health checks and o…: Infrastructure strain occurred after several servers failed automated health checks and overloaded remaining capacity.
  • The company confirmed there was no evidence of a cyberattack or malicious activity causin…: The company confirmed there was no evidence of a cyberattack or malicious activity causing the disruption.
  • This event represents another major operational challenge following earlier Microsoft 365…: This event represents another major operational challenge following earlier Microsoft 365 issues and an Azure outage last month.

Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1

Microsoft shares came under pressure on Friday after a major global outage disrupted several of its flagship software and productivity services, including Outlook, Teams, and its artificial intelligence (AI) assistant Copilot, leaving businesses, government agencies, and individual users struggling to access essential tools for more than 12 hours.

Microsoft’s products are among the most widely used software among business, government, and educational institutions. The software giant has struggled to restore normal operations since the disruption began on Thursday, with its latest recovery measures failing to deliver a sustained improvement in service availability.

Microsoft shares fell around 2.8% in pre-market trading on Friday, reflecting investor concerns over the prolonged disruption and its potential implications for the company's enterprise software business.

In its latest update on Friday, Microsoft said the outage was affecting a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online and email services. The company said it was continuing to investigate the issue and working through different approaches to bring affected servers back online.

The disruption has also extended beyond the US, affecting users across several…

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