Shares of Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) are in focus after a widespread Microsoft 365 outage that began Thursday disrupted Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other workplace applications for thousands of users.
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Microsoft Works to Restore Services
Microsoft continued working to restore services Thursday evening as the outage also affected Microsoft integrations used by OpenAI and Anthropic, according to Benzinga’s coverage. Downdetector recorded more than 130,000 Outlook complaints at the peak. For a business that sells workplace software on reliability, the scale is a concern.
Microsoft listed Exchange Online mailbox access and email delivery among the problems. Teams calendar and meeting scheduling, Copilot Chat, Microsoft Graph requests and parts of SharePoint, Planner and Defender were also disrupted. Core Teams messaging and meetings stayed largely functional, as did direct access to SharePoint files, so the outage hit features across products rather than shutting down every service.
Microsoft said it was not aware of any malicious activity. It reported better server stability after applying an authentication and routing patch and was working to expand the fix to active regions.
Security and Compliance Tools Were Also Hit
The outage reached Microsoft’s security products too. According to an incident report maintained by the University of Pennsylvania’s IT department, which draws on Microsoft’s disclosures, problems affected Defender for Office 365, Defender XDR and Purview.
Safe Links could fail to process rewritten URLs, administrators had trouble releasing quarantined messages, and Defender XDR pages loaded poorly. In Purview, data loss prevention, information protection labels, audit searches and eDiscovery were among the affected capabilities.
Microsoft’s disclosures don’t show that customers were left unprotected or that attackers exploited the disruption.
MSFT Shares in Focus
MSFT Price Action: Microsoft shares were down 0.26% at $521.66 at the time of publication, according to Benzinga Pro.
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