Microsoft outage drags into a second day, and shares fall 2.9% before the open

Microsoft (MSFT) had still not fully restored Outlook and other Microsoft 365 services on Friday morning, about 17 hours after the outage began.

Microsoft's latest update, at 5:28 a.m. ET, reported "incremental improvement in several workloads", but capacity has not fully come back. Outlook may still not work on the web or the desktop, while most of Teams is working again.

Delayed emails will keep trying to reach their recipients for up to 48 hours while Microsoft clears the backlog.

Earlier fixes did not hold. On Thursday night, the company wrote on X that changes it had applied were "not taking as expected."

Microsoft says it is not aware of any malicious activity. Australia's Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft had compared the problem to the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, "where there is an update that has gone awry."

The disruption reached the stock market. Euronext (EPA:ENX), which runs exchanges in Paris, Amsterdam, Milan and four other cities, told listed companies to call by phone on urgent matters such as trading suspensions. Its listing teams could not receive email.

In Taiwan, Reuters reports that fund management was disrupted at securities firms, life insurers and investment trust companies.

Two companies were late with their results. Workhorse Group (WKHS) moved its third-quarter report from Thursday to November 16, and the Swiss luxury group Richemont (SWX:CFR) released its results slightly late on Friday.

Governments were hit as well. Australia's spy agency and federal police, Japan's government IT systems, Singapore's government email and the US House of Representatives all reported problems. In the UK, the National Health Service said some of its services were affected.

Microsoft shares were down 2.9% in premarket trading as of 6:00 a.m. ET. Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at eToro, said investors would likely look past the outage because "very few of these customers can realistically walk away from the Microsoft ecosystem overnight." But he warned that repeated outages hand IT departments "a reason to think twice."

Microsoft has said it will treat the incident "with urgency and priority until full resolution."

Sources & Further Reading

1. "Service health status." Microsoft. November 13, 2026.
2. "Recovery actions are ongoing across affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure." Microsoft 365 Status on X. November 13, 2026.
3. "We've monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability." Microsoft 365 Status on X. November 12, 2026.
4. "Microsoft outage spills into Asia-Pacific business hours despite 'partial recovery'." Reuters. November 13, 2026.
5. "Euronext asks listed companies to phone after Outlook outage." Reuters. November 13, 2026.
6. "Widespread Microsoft outage continues, taking down Outlook and other 365 services." CNBC. November 13, 2026.
7. "Microsoft outage hits companies and governments worldwide as it struggles to restore services." Associated Press. November 13, 2026.