US equity futures were little changed Friday as investors weighed a Microsoft outage, AI developments and upcoming inflation data

US equity futures were little changed on Friday as investors weighed a Microsoft outage, developments in artificial intelligence, and an upcoming inflation report. The headline indicates a stalemate rather than a directional move, suggesting that offsetting forces were roughly balanced across the session. Microsoft's exposure to the outage is transmitted mainly through its large weighting in index futures and its role as a bellwether for cloud and AI spending, so any operational disruption tends to weigh on the stock and on sentiment toward technology-heavy benchmarks. The inflation data matters because a hotter-than-expected CPI print would likely lift Treasury yields and reprice expectations for Federal Reserve rate cuts, pressuring long-duration growth equities. Traders will watch the upcoming Consumer Price Index release for core services and shelter components, which the Fed tracks closely, alongside the Microsoft stock's trading behavior once the outage is fully assessed.

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