Microsoft shares pressured on Friday as traders weigh outage’s impact

Detailed summary

Microsoft's stock price was under pressure early on Friday as a global outage for Microsoft web services continued to disrupt email accounts and some other applications worldwide.

Microsoft’s stock price was under pressure early on Friday as a global outage for Microsoft web services continued to disrupt email accounts and some other applications worldwide, while Nvidia shares stabilized as investors assess how Jensen Huang’s departure might affect chip supply and the global artificial intelligence industry.

Microsoft said in an update that the outage was affecting a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online and email services. Services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were reported by users to be down.

Shares of Microsoft were down about 6.4 per cent at US$516 as of 8:15 a.m. Eastern time, and before the Friday trading session commenced.

Futures for the S&P 500 climbed 0.2 per cent on Friday, while those for the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.1 per cent. Nasdaq futures were up slightly.

Shares of Nvidia gained nearly three per cent before the market opened.

The departure of Huang, who co-founded Nvidia and has been a key architect of its role at the center of the AI boom, has raised questions about the company’s future. Its shares fell 15 per cent after his resignation was announced Thursday, though recovered during the day.

Huang had been the face of Nvidia and was deemed by some in the industry as bigger than Nvidia itself.

Huang stepped down after his affair with a Chinese tech executive raised U.S. national security concerns. Nvidia’s longtime chief financial officer, Colette Kress, will be its interim CEO.

A lynchpin of the AI boom, Nvidia trades off with Apple as Wall Street’s most valuable company and has invested heavily in other AI firms. Market watchers will be keeping a keen eye out for what Nvidia’s woes might mean for pending public debuts of AI companies, such as Anthropic’s pending IPO, valued at $1.3 trillion.

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