Microsoft’s Outlook outage hits day two

PLUS: Jensen Huang's fortune drops by $10B

Good morning, tech enthusiasts. Microsoft’s email outage is in its second day, and the tools office workers depend on (Outlook, SharePoint, Copilot) are still glitching for businesses, governments, airlines, and banks around the world.

The company reports “encouraging recovery progress” but still can’t say what broke. One Taiwanese financial firm has gone back to confirming trades by fax.

In today’s tech rundown:

  • Microsoft’s Outlook outage drags into day two

  • Oura makes $625M push into AI healthcare

  • Pfizer chases the once-a-month GLP-1

  • Sweden gives data centers a Nordic twist

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

MICROSOFT

Image source: Creative Commons / Coolcaesar

The Rundown: Microsoft’s global outage rolled into a second day Friday, November 13, disrupting Outlook, Teams features, and AI integrations as businesses and governments wait for a full recovery.

The details:

  • Microsoft reported incremental improvement but said capacity is still below normal. It also extended its email timeout window to 48 hours so delayed messages don’t bounce.

  • Recovery has been uneven. Servers Microsoft brought back overnight failed again under traffic. On Friday, it began rolling back a network change.

  • The failure is in Exchange Online and the features built on it, including Copilot, SharePoint, and Defender XDR. Core Teams chat and meetings mostly still work.

  • U.S. Outlook reports hit roughly 130K at Thursday’s peak. Government agencies, airlines, and financial firms reported disruptions.

Why it matters: More than 20 hours in, Microsoft still hasn’t named a root cause, and the damage now reaches the AI tools plugged into its software, with OpenAI and Anthropic reporting broken 365 connectors. It follows two other notable Microsoft 365 disruptions this year, including a nearly 10-hour North American outage in January.

TOGETHER WITH AWS

The Rundown: Teams building agentic systems usually scope what a person can touch before scoping what an AI agent can. Yet the agent holds tools, permissions, and autonomy that it can put to work. In this Building Agentic Systems on AWS workshop, AWS experts show how to bound an agent’s blast radius and trace its decisions.

Learn how to:

  • Secure agent infrastructure and code

  • Block prompt injection with guardrails, structured prompts, and regression tests

  • Limit the blast radius with least-privilege tools and permissions

  • Observe agent behavior with tools like Snyk and Honeycomb.io in AWS Marketplace

OURA

Image source: Oura

The Rundown: Oura, the smart ring maker last valued at $11B, is buying Counsel Health, the AI-native primary care startup already running inside its app, for $625M — a few weeks after putting its $2.2B IPO on hold.

The details:

  • Counsel pairs a medical chatbot with licensed physicians. It has been built into the Oura app since June, giving members personalized medical advice.

  • The price: $625M for a startup of about 70 people (per Bloomberg) that raised $36M in total, according to PitchBook estimates.

  • CEO Muthu Alagappan becomes Oura’s chief clinical AI officer. Counsel will keep serving its enterprise partners outside Oura.

  • The acquisition follows Oura’s postponed IPO, as the company reported $1.75B in fiscal 2026 revenue, up 92% year over year.

Why it matters: The battle in wearables is shifting from who collects the best health data to who can turn it into real medical care. With WHOOP pursuing a similar strategy, Oura’s $625M acquisition is a bet that owning the AI and physician infrastructure will give it an edge beyond hardware and subscriptions.

BIOTECH

Image source: Pfizer

The Rundown: Weekly shots turned GLP-1s into a mass-market drug class, and Pfizer now wants one dose a month. Blackstone Life Sciences has agreed to pay up to $1.5B to support and test whether its drug berobenatide can deliver it.

The details:

  • Blackstone will fund up to $1.5B in development costs through 2028 for the experimental GLP-1 drug Pfizer acquired in its $10B takeover of Metsera.

  • Designed for once-monthly dosing, berobenatide could challenge the weekly injection model that has helped Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk dominate the market.

  • Pfizer has 10 ongoing or planned Phase 3 trials examining weight management and obesity-related conditions, including sleep apnea and knee osteoarthritis.

  • Blackstone could receive milestone payments tied to FDA approval and subsequent sales targets. Pfizer will retain full control of the drug.

Why it matters: Weight-loss drugs went from daily to weekly shots in under a decade. Now, Pfizer could make them monthly. In Phase 2b, patients switching to monthly injections kept losing weight, with results approaching Lilly’s weekly Zepbound. If larger trials deliver, convenience could become the next battleground in the obesity-drug race.

DATA CENTERS

Image source: EcoDataCenter

The Rundown: As data centers become a political flashpoint, EcoDataCenter’s campus in Falun, Sweden, combines timber construction and renewable power with a practical use for server heat — drying wood pellets, reports the Guardian.

The details:

  • The campus uses cross-laminated timber and sources electricity through a mix of 75% hydropower and 25% wind.

  • Surplus heat goes to a neighboring energy plant for pellet production, but the company said energy reused outside the Falun campus amounted to just 0.5% of its total energy consumption in 2025.

  • At the end of 2025, EcoDataCenter connected a liquid-cooled AI cluster to its heat-recovery system, which it expected to operate for more hours in 2026.

  • Mistral’s €1.2B partnership with EcoDataCenter targets a 2027 opening at Borlänge, on a former paper-mill site, with access to 250 MW of power initially.

Why it matters: Falun’s hydro, solar, and wind sometimes produce more power than the grid needs, and a big data center load helps balance it. The Borlänge project comes next, with 250MW in phase one (about 3x Falun’s 80MW) and room for 600MW. That makes it a test of whether local benefits can keep up with AI’s power demand.

QUICK HITS

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigned amid alleged affairs, including with a suspected spy, as falling shares erased nearly $10B from his fortune. He is also set to testify before Congress ahead of Thanksgiving.

Huang reportedly questioned the leadership abilities of his successor, interim CEO Colette Kress, a 13-year-company veteran, describing her as a “deer in the headlights.”

SpaceX and Tesla could announce a merger as soon as December, which would be the largest merger ever, reports Bloomberg.

SpaceX plans to invest more than $74B in AI supercomputing campuses in Texas and Arizona, with the Arizona project still awaiting local approval amid community opposition.

The U.S. government obtained court approval to seize $1.2B in cryptocurrency stolen during a record $6.3B Binance hack attributed to North Korean hackers.

WHOOP, which makes wearable trackers for sleep, recovery, and fitness, launched Humans, a social network with accounts it says are verified by users’ heartbeats.

TikTok’s parent company ByteDance reportedly plans to repurchase up to $6B in shares from investors at a roughly $400B valuation, according to The Information.

An experimental chewing gum from Penn cut HPV levels by up to 93% in lab tests on saliva from head and neck cancer patients; human trials come next.

That's it for today's tech rundown!

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Rowan, Zach, Shubham, Jennifer, and Nate — The Rundown’s editorial team

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