Microsoft shares slide as 365 outage enters second day

Microsoft shares fell in premarket trading on Friday, November 13, as a global outage of its Microsoft 365 services ran into a second day. According to Dow Jones Newswires, the stock dropped about 2.7% before the opening bell, which put the company on course to lose more than $103 billion in market value. The disruption knocked out Outlook, Teams and Copilot for businesses and governments around the world, and AI developers OpenAI and Anthropic said their own services were affected.morningstar.com

A second day of disruption

The problems started on the afternoon of Thursday, November 12. By Friday, the outage had lasted more than 12 hours and was cutting off communications for organizations worldwide, Reuters reported. It carried into Asia-Pacific business hours and affected government agencies in Australia, Japan and the United States, according to Reuters via Rappler. Microsoft said Microsoft 365 features that depend on Exchange Online and email were hit, while features that do not rely on Exchange Online kept working.rappler.com+1

Microsoft blamed server problems and said it had no indication of malicious cyber activity, Dow Jones reported. The company also said a number of servers had become unexpectedly unavailable, which put extra load on the rest of its infrastructure. In a post on X at about 7:09 a.m. on Friday, Microsoft said service availability and email delivery were "improving across a growing portion of affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure." It added that it had extended the email timeout window to 48 hours to protect delayed mail, according to a USA Today Network report. Earlier, the company said it was seeing "early stabilization and capacity improvements as recovery actions continue."rmb.reuters.com+1

Ripple effects for AI and business

The outage also broke connectors that OpenAI's and Anthropic's AI services use, Reuters reported via BusinessWorld. OpenAI warned that new connections to Microsoft services could fail and that some tools might not work as expected, Profit reported. Electric truck maker Workhorse Group pushed its third-quarter results from November 12 to November 16, citing disruption from the outage. Reports of Outlook problems on Downdetector peaked at more than 138,000 around 1 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday.bworldonline.com+1

Questions about cloud concentration

This is Microsoft's second major incident in a matter of weeks. Last month, an outage of its Azure cloud platform disrupted its productivity software and a range of industries, Reuters noted.miamiherald.com

Mikhail Zverev, a fund manager at Amati Global Investors, told Dow Jones that the episode is "a reminder that concentration of critical cloud services in a few places creates systemic vulnerabilities." He expects the impact to be short-lived, though. "I don't expect this one to de-rail transition of more workloads to the cloud over time," he said.morningstar.com