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Microsoft 365 Outage Hits Copilot as Shares Reported Lower

A Microsoft 365 outage that began on Thursday evening in the UK was still being fixed on Friday morning. MarketWatch reported the shares lower in US premarket trading, and Copilot, the AI tool Microsoft promotes hardest, was among the services hit.

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) shares were reported lower in US premarket trading today, according to MarketWatch, as an outage across its Microsoft 365 software continued into Friday. The US software and cloud group sells Windows, Outlook, Teams, Azure and the Copilot AI assistants.

The fall was reported at 12.14pm UK time, 7.14am in New York. The shares closed yesterday at $523.00, up 0.36%, even though the problems began about three hours before the US close, so the premarket fall is the first clear reaction.

Microsoft said the outage began shortly before 1pm in New York, around 6pm UK time, and knocked out Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and Copilot. Microsoft said a number of servers became unexpectedly unavailable, which put elevated load, meaning unusually heavy demand, on the remaining infrastructure across several regions. Microsoft said some servers failed automatic health checks, the tests that confirm a server is working. Microsoft said it had detected no malicious activity.

Microsoft said that by 4pm in New York on Thursday it had validated an alternative health check method and was applying it more broadly. Microsoft said around 7am in New York on Friday that it saw encouraging recovery in Europe and improvement in North America, while expecting intermittent issues. The NHS said some services were affected but patients should attend appointments as normal.

As of about 10am UK time on Friday, Microsoft’s latest update said:

We will continue to treat this with urgency until full mitigation

Microsoft

Line chart of Microsoft's daily closes over six weeks, Thursday's close inside a range set by early-November extremes.
Microsoft’s daily closing price, 1 October to 12 November 2026

The shares were already volatile. Since the 1st of October they have closed between $507.12 on the 2nd of November and $555.80 on the 4th. Thursday’s close sat 5.9% below the high and 3.1% above the low.

Copilot is the awkward part, given that Microsoft reported more than 100 million monthly active users in 2025.

Alan Woodward, professor of cyber security at the University of Surrey, thought a mistake more likely than an attack.

The US open at 2.30pm UK time will show whether the shares hold the $507.12 low.

Asktraders News Team
Asktraders News Team
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The AskTraders Analyst Team features experts in technical and fundamental analysis, as well as traders specializing in stocks, forex, and cryptocurrency.

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