From Claude's threat to the giant's crash: Microsoft's challenging week

Microsoft suffered two blows this week: Anthropic launched AI tools competing with Office, and a widespread outage knocked out Outlook and Teams for over 12 hours. The stock fell about 3%.

Microsoft experienced a particularly challenging week, with two major events that put pressure on the company's stock. On Tuesday, Anthropic announced the launch of new AI tools, including Claude Sheets, which directly compete with Microsoft's Office suite. The announcement raised concerns among investors about potential damage to Microsoft's core business, despite the company being one of Anthropic's largest investors. Later in the week, on Friday, a widespread outage disrupted Outlook, Teams, and Copilot services for over 12 hours worldwide, affecting businesses and government entities. Microsoft stated that the issues were server-related with no malicious activity. In response, Microsoft's stock fell more than 4% on Tuesday and Wednesday, and another 2.5% in pre-market trading on Friday, but partially recovered to end the week down about 3%.