Microsoft Shares Fall About 3% Before the Bell as the Outlook and 365 Outage Runs Into a Second Day
Microsoft traded around $506 to $508 in premarket, roughly 3% down, while analysts kept a $632 average target and the company said it had found no sign of malicious activity.
Friday, November 13, 2026/2 min read
Investors have so far treated Microsoft's outage as an embarrassment, not a threat. Shares in the company fell about 3 percent in premarket trading on Friday, as much as 3 percent according to a Reuters report carried by Phemex, and 2.6 percent lower in CNBC's reading, while the Outlook and Microsoft 365 failure that began on Thursday afternoon ran into a second day. The stock had not yet traded in the regular session as this was written, so this is an indication, not a close.
The outage itself is covered in our report on the failure. This piece is about what it did to the share price.
How far have Microsoft shares fallen?
The Russian news agency TASS put the shares at $507.75 at 12:03 Moscow time (09:03 GMT) and $506.12 half an hour later, a fall of 3.23 percent. FX Leaders reported that the stock slid about 3 percent in extended trading after Thursday's session and was around 6 percent below its early-November record high of $555. Premarket prices come from thin trading and can change sharply once the regular session opens at 14:30 GMT.
Analysts were not rushing for the exits. TipRanks noted a Strong Buy consensus on the stock, with 35 Buy and four Hold ratings over the past three months and an average price target of $632.48, which implies about 21 percent of upside.
What has Microsoft said about the cause and the fix?
Microsoft's service-health updates said some servers unexpectedly became unavailable, putting extra load on the rest, and that a core process on affected servers became overwhelmed, BleepingComputer reported. The company said it is not aware of malicious activity, and vice-president Charles Lamanna said the disruption was not caused by hackers or outside interference, per TASS.
Early Friday, TipRanks said Microsoft's latest update on X described a fix as not working as expected and said engineers were identifying alternate workstreams. Microsoft later reported early signs of stabilisation but said capacity had not returned to normal, CNBC said, and it has not given a time for full restoration. It promised to share the root cause once the problem is resolved.
Why is the market not panicking?
FX Leaders said investors see the outage as a temporary operational problem rather than a serious threat to the company's cloud business. The size of the premarket drop, roughly 3 percent, is modest next to the plunge Nvidia suffered on Thursday.
The outage did not spread to rivals. Amazon said its services were operating normally and attributed reports of problems to an unrelated disruption elsewhere on the internet, CNBC reported.
What to watch when Wall Street opens
The test comes at 14:30 GMT. If Microsoft's repairs hold and email flows again, the premarket loss could narrow. If Microsoft publishes a root cause pointing to its own change management, or if the recovery stalls into the weekend, the questions will shift from lost hours to how much customers rely on a single supplier. The promised post-incident report is the document analysts will read most closely.
Published in The Outspoken Digest
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