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

Detailed summary

A global Microsoft outage lasting more than 12 hours disrupted Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services across more than 70 countries.

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 regions, including Asia-Pacific, with outage reports emerging from more than 70 countries and territories.

Microsoft initially acknowledged problems with users accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods. Its engineers subsequently identified elevated server loads and infrastructure issues as likely contributors to the connectivity problems.

The company said several servers had unexpectedly become unavailable after failing automated health checks, forcing the remaining infrastructure to handle additional traffic and contributing to connectivity errors.

However, the recovery process has proved more complicated than initially expected.

The company later reported signs of stabilisation after implementing…

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