Microsoft Copilot hit by major global outage: Here's why

Users report global outages in Microsoft’s flagship artificial intelligence assistant, Copilot.

Beyond disrupting services across its standalone platform, there’s interruption in its critical integration within widely used Microsoft 365 applications such as Word, Excel, and Teams.

The outage was first reported on Tuesday morning, December 9. Later, the Down Detector confirmed the disruption.

Additionally, the official Microsoft 365 Status account on X (formerly known as Twitter) a;sp verified the news.

Those who attempted using services were met with a generic error message, “Sorry I wasn’t able to respond to that, is there something else I can help with?”

As of now, no official root cause of the outage has been reported. However experts note that the possible causes can be a software update or configuration change, infrastructure failure, overwhelming demand or a cascade failure, or any security incident.

The incidents follow a heightened regulatory scrutiny of major tech firms’ AI operations. For instance as reported by Guardian, the European Union is currently investigating Google’s use of online content for AI purposes.