Given the current febrile state of the technology market, where bad news tends to be punished without mercy, you might have expected a global outage of Outlook, Teams and Copilot, now rolling into a second day, to leave Microsoft's shares badly bruised.
Instead, the stock barely flinched.
Microsoft slipped just 0.90%, or $4.72, to $518.28 in pre-market trading. That still lops around $35 billion off the value of the company, such is its scale, but as a reaction to worldwide disruption it is remarkably muted.
The restraint is all the more striking set against Nvidia, which shed more than a tenth of its value this week after Jensen Huang's abrupt exit as chief executive.
Different strokes
The stories are different, and the stakes higher for Nvidia: losing a visionary founder with no obvious successor is a shock to the whole investment case, whereas an outage, however embarrassing, costs Microsoft not a single customer.
Much of the corporate world runs its working day through Microsoft 365 and has nowhere else to go.
The disruption itself was serious enough. It began at 4.17pm UK time on Thursday, centred on Exchange Online, Microsoft's cloud-based email and calendar service, before widening a couple of hours later into a broader failure that swept in Teams, SharePoint and Copilot.
70 countries
The problems reached users across more than 70 countries, and reports of Outlook faults peaked at around 130,000 on the Downdetector tracking site.
Microsoft was quick to rule out foul play, blaming overloaded servers and infrastructure problems rather than hackers.
By Friday it said it was seeing early signs of stabilisation, while cautioning that services had not yet fully recovered.
Awkward timing
Copilot is the AI assistant Microsoft has been promoting hardest, and this is the second major Microsoft 365 failure this year, sharpening customer concerns about reliability.
The shares were already under pressure, on track for their longest weekly losing streak since 2012 and trading at their cheapest since that year, as thinner margins on AI gear weigh on sentiment. Earnings are due next week.
Read more
