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.