Microsoft Shares Fall 2.6% Premarket as 365 Outage Enters Second Day
Microsoft shares fell 2.6% in premarket trading on November 13 as a global outage left Outlook and Microsoft 365 unreliable for a second day. Governments and companies in Asia-Pacific and Europe reported disruption, and the company gave no timeline for full recovery.
Microsoft shares fell 2.6% in premarket trading on Friday, November 13, as a widespread outage knocked out Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services for a second day. The company has not given a timeline for full restoration.
The disruption affected millions of customers. Microsoft said it did not suspect malicious activity.
What failed and when
Connectivity problems began shortly before 1 p.m. ET on Thursday and ran into Friday. Outlook and Teams were hit, along with SharePoint, Copilot and 365 tools that connect to email, including Outlook Calendar.
Microsoft first blamed a traffic surge in part of its infrastructure and a fault in a component that processes server health. It said "elevated load across multiple regions" followed after a number of servers became unexpectedly unavailable and strained the rest. Some servers were failing automated health checks.
Email and related tools stayed unavailable through the Asian business day on Friday and across Europe and the early U.S. morning.
Recovery under way
In an update at around 5 a.m. ET, Microsoft said users might still be unable to connect to several 365 products, including Outlook on the web or desktop. Most access to Teams had returned.
The company said recovery was moving in phases and that it was seeing "incremental improvement in several workloads." It added that service was variable and full capacity had not returned. About 45 minutes earlier, it had reported "early signs of stabilization."
Engineers are taking affected systems offline for repair and bringing them back in stages. Microsoft is extending the timeout window for delayed emails to as long as 48 hours so messages are not lost.
Businesses and governments react
Governments and businesses in Asia-Pacific and Europe said they were monitoring the situation. The UK's National Health Service said some of its services were affected but told patients to attend appointments as normal.
Richemont, the Swiss luxury goods group, delayed its earnings slightly on Friday. Electric truck maker Workhorse Group moved its third-quarter results from November 12 to November 16, citing disruption from the outage. Air India said it had "temporarily rerouted" emails to keep receiving customer messages, and that flight operations were not affected.
Australian Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke told a press conference that Microsoft "believe they are dealing in some ways similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry." A faulty CrowdStrike update caused a major global IT outage in 2024.
Amazon Web Services said it was "operating normally" and pointed to inaccurate reports of outages on its platforms.
Second drop this week
The Friday slide follows a 2.5% fall on Wednesday, November 11, as of 10:30 a.m. ET. That drop came after Anthropic's amended IPO filing listed Microsoft among seven strategic buyers in a $26 billion concurrent placement.
Microsoft's share is about $1 billion, or 13,513,513 shares at the $74 midpoint. That equals roughly 0.03% of Microsoft's $3.97 trillion market value. Shares traded at $532.44 at the time.
The filing says Anthropic's Claude is sold through AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, with Anthropic paying each cloud provider a fee. Microsoft said in 2025 that its Copilot assistants had more than 100 million monthly active users.
