Microsoft Copilot Outage Disrupts Users, Company Investigates

‘We’ve received logs from impacted users and are reviewing them to identify the root cause,’ Microsoft said in a bulletin.

Microsoft’s Copilot artificial intelligence tool experienced a four-hour, 25-minute outage Monday morning, with certain users unable to access Copilot desktop or the web application.

The Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant published a note online saying that Microsoft restored Copilot service at 5:35 pm UTC Monday. The outage started at 1:10 p.m. UTC, with users experiencing app load and timeout errors when accessing the tool.

“We've rerouted requests to healthy infrastructure and have confirmed through our telemetry that service health has recovered,” Microsoft said in the bulletin.

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Microsoft Confirms Copilot Outage

CRN has reached out to Microsoft for comment.

Corey Kirkendoll, CEO of Allen, Texas-based Microsoft solution provider 5K Technical Services—a member of CRN’s MSP 500—told CRN in an interview that Copilot was intermittently going out for him Monday. In the meantime, customers were waiting the outage out or trying to accomplish work with another tool they had permission to use.

The outage serves as a lesson as to why MSPs and customers need to keep a human in the loop as they explore what workloads and workflows they can offload onto cutting-edge AI tools like Copilot, Kirkendoll said. Incidents like these are why 5K goes through business continuity planning with customers.

“This is exactly why we have these conversations,” the CEO said. “Treat AI tools like any other critical SaaS and never let a single vendor become a single point of failure.”

Kirkendoll added that “resilience is not a nice-to-have anymore. It is a business requirement.”

John Snyder, CEO of Durham, N.C.-based Microsoft solution provider Net Friends, told CRN in an interview that his company and his customers did not report any downtime or degradation with Copilot.

But the incident did give him a chance to leverage an internal AI tool used for checking systems.

“We didn’t experience any issues because it appears most reported problems were with the mobile app,” Snyder said.

Signs of a Copilot outage peaked at 486 reports at 8:46 a.m. Pacific on online outage detection website Downdetector. Reports of a Microsoft 365 outage reached 812 by 6:07 a.m. Pacific Monday but had fallen to under 30 by 1:22 p.m. Copilot users can buy the AI tool as part of the M365 package of applications and services.

This article has been updated to reflect that the outage ended.