Microsoft shares fell 2% due to a major outage. It has been ongoing for a second day.
Microsoft shares fell 2% due to a major outage / Photo: JHVEPhoto / Shutterstock
Microsoft shares fell 2% in premarket trading on November 13. For the second day in a row, the company has been unable to resolve a technical glitch that has disrupted its flagship products, including the Outlook email service, the Teams video conferencing service, and the Copilot chatbot. This outage is already one of the longest in the company’s history—previously, such issues were typically resolved much more quickly, Bloomberg notes.
On November 13, the company stated that the issue was caused by server problems rather than malicious activity, and that following the widespread deployment of fixes, it is seeing signs that services are stabilizing; however, service operations have not yet been fully restored. According to a Microsoft service announcement, the affected Microsoft 365 features were those that rely on the Exchange Online cloud-based email platform, while other components continued to function normally.
Who was affected by the outage?
The outage disrupted the operations of other online services, as well as government agencies, traders, and businesses around the world.
The AI lab OpenAI reported that ChatGPT experienced disruptions due to an issue with Microsoft connectors—tools that link the chatbot to Microsoft 365 applications. “Creating new connections may not work properly, and the tools may not function as expected,” OpenAI warned.
Anthropic reported a similar issue that affected Claude's integration with Outlook and other Microsoft services.
Euronext, the exchange operator, reported email problems at its listing divisions, according to Reuters. In Taiwan, the disruptions disrupted fund management at brokerages, life insurers, and investment trusts: according to one source, one company canceled a bond buyback, while another, according to a second source, was forced to confirm transactions via fax.
In the U.S., electric truck manufacturer Workhorse Group postponed the release of its financial results from November 12 to November 16, while Swiss luxury goods company Richemont briefly delayed the announcement of its first-half financial results on Friday.
Context
This is the second Microsoft 365 outage this year: the company previously experienced outages in January and October of last year, and last month, an outage on the Azure cloud platform affected Microsoft’s office suite and several industries around the world.
Investors will likely put up with this kind of disruption for now, since it is difficult for customers to quickly abandon the Microsoft ecosystem, Josh Gilbert, an analyst at the eToro trading platform, told Reuters.
“The main concern is that this isn’t the first 365 outage this year, and if reliability starts to look like a recurring problem, every IT department will have a reason to think twice before entrusting even more business processes to a single provider,”, he said.
This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor
