Microsoft shares are falling in premarket trading on Wall Street as the company tries to fix a glitch that is disrupting several of its main online services. Before 7:40 a.m. Eastern time, the tech giant’s stock was trading at $517.22, down 1.07%.
The drop comes as users continue to have trouble accessing Outlook, Teams, Office 365 and Copilot, among other Microsoft tools. The outage, which began Thursday, has lasted more than 16 hours and is affecting both individual users and companies and agencies that rely on the company’s infrastructure.
What is happening with Microsoft services
Microsoft is keeping in place an alert over a “degradation of its services” and acknowledges that some users may still have trouble connecting to various Microsoft 365 and Outlook tools.
The problem is not limited to a single application. The outage also affects products aimed at businesses, consumers and governments, while some administrators may even have trouble accessing the center used to manage the outages themselves.
The company is working to restore normal operation of its platforms, although external outage-tracking tools continue to record connectivity problems. The length of the incident is one of the factors beginning to weigh on investor sentiment.
Why investors are concerned
The outage again puts under scrutiny the dependence of companies and public agencies on major tech providers, especially when a failure affects services used on a global scale at the same time.
The most memorable precedent is the chaos caused in July 2024 by a flawed update to CrowdStrike’s cybersecurity software, which knocked millions of Windows devices offline and disrupted banking operations, emergency systems and flights in several countries.
At the time, Microsoft estimated that about 8.5 million devices had been affected. This episode does not have a comparable scale so far, but it again highlights the risks tied to the concentration of digital services in a few companies.
Microsoft has also already logged Microsoft 365 outages in January 2026 and October 2025, according to Reuters. In October, it also suffered an incident in Azure, its cloud computing platform, which affected different productivity tools.
For now, the stock move is modest: Microsoft heads into the Wall Street open down 1.07% in premarket trading, on a day when investors will be watching closely to see how the outage develops and whether the company can fully restore its services.