Microsoft slides 2.8% as global outage hits Outlook and Teams

Microsoft shares dropped about 2.8% in pre-market trading on Friday after a worldwide disruption to its productivity software left businesses, government agencies and individual users unable to reach core tools, according to Mint. The outage hit Outlook, Teams and the Copilot AI assistant and lasted more than 12 hours in Mint’s account, while The Guardian reported services were down for roughly 18 hours before recovery began shortly before midday GMT on Friday.

Key facts

• Microsoft shares fell around 2.8% in pre-market trading on Friday, Mint reported; The Guardian said the stock was down 1.1% at $516.86 when Wall Street opened.
• Outage reports came from more than 70 countries and territories, with Mint citing Asia-Pacific among affected regions; Down Detector logged nearly 130,000 reports across 74 countries, per The Guardian.
• Microsoft said several servers failed automated health checks and became unexpectedly unavailable, loading the remaining infrastructure; it found no sign of malicious activity or a cyberattack.
• The Guardian reported Microsoft said it was “deeply sorry” and had “addressed the underlying issue”; Cointelegraph reported a 7:25 am UTC update saying a patch had improved stability on some servers with no timetable for full restoration.
• IndiGo, Akasa Air and Air India reported email support problems in India; Taiwan-based securities and financial firms reported fund-management and trade-communication disruption, including one that used a fax to confirm trades.

What went wrong inside Microsoft’s network

Microsoft initially confirmed that users could not reach Exchange Online mailboxes through several connection methods. Its engineers later tied the failures to elevated server loads and infrastructure trouble, saying servers had dropped out after failing automated checks and pushed extra traffic onto the rest of the system.

Also read: Microsoft outage drags into second day as Australian costs near billions

Fixes did not take hold at first. In a Friday update, Microsoft said the changes it made to restore availability were not working as intended and that it was looking at other ways to add capacity while traffic stayed unbalanced. It later reported signs of stabilisation after broader fixes. The Guardian reported Microsoft suggested the cause may have been problems with settings applied to servers supporting Microsoft 365, and quoted RMIT University associate professor Mark Gregory describing a possible misconfiguration in the network layer that produced a cascading overload.

Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s executive vice-president of Copilot, said the company regretted the disruption and was working to address the issue, according to The Guardian. Microsoft said the incident was a technical issue unrelated to cyberattacks or AI agents.

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Governments, hospitals and airlines hit

The disruption reached public services well beyond corporate email. The Guardian reported UK healthcare systems were affected, several British police forces asked the public to report crimes by phone instead of online, some schools took attendance by phone and National Rail warned travellers might not access emailed tickets. US congressional offices that rely on Outlook were affected, and the City of Tampa posted a notice on its website; a Colorado sheriff’s office said it could not process bond payments and asked people to come in person.

Cointelegraph reported that the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit said its clerk’s office could neither send nor receive email for much of Thursday, Japan’s Finance Ministry could not receive email on Friday, and Singapore’s Government Technology Agency said government email was among affected systems. The Guardian reported Australian national security agencies could not access or send email, while the Australian Medical Association said patient care was not affected. RSM Australia estimated the financial cost at billions of dollars, The Guardian reported.

The outage also spread to outside AI tools that plug into Microsoft 365. OpenAI said it was investigating broken connections and tools that were not working as expected, and Anthropic said an upstream provider issue was affecting its Microsoft 365 connector, according to The Guardian. Cointelegraph reported that most email, calendar and search requests through Claude’s connector failed.

Why it matters

Microsoft 365 underpins daily communication for a large share of enterprises and public bodies, so a multi-hour failure cascades into policing, healthcare, courts, shipping and trading desks at once. Cointelegraph reported Microsoft disclosed more than 450 million paid commercial seats for the suite, while The Guardian cited company figures of more than 430 million Microsoft 365 users and said over 90% of Fortune 500 companies use Copilot.

The incident follows other Microsoft 365 disruptions this year and an Azure cloud outage last month, and it lands as Microsoft pushes AI features such as Copilot into the same stack customers depend on for email. Repeated interruptions give enterprise buyers a reason to weigh backup providers and multi-vendor setups, a point Gregory made when he told The Guardian that businesses reliant on cloud services should have alternatives.

What to watch

Microsoft has not published a full post-incident account of the faulty configuration or a restoration timetable beyond the Cointelegraph-reported 7:25 am UTC update. Watch for its formal root-cause write-up and any customer guidance on redundancy, plus whether the share decline holds once trading settles. This is not financial advice, and markets are uncertain and volatile.

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StockPil Editorial

The StockPil Editorial desk covers stock markets, business, finance, forex and crypto. Our AI-assisted newsroom builds each article from published, linked sources, checks it for accuracy before it goes live, and our editors review published articles and correct anything that needs it.

Sources: Mint, The Guardian, Cointelegraph