Microsoft’s Copilot and Bing down, users report

Copilot, Microsoft’s AI assistant, and search engine Bing were not working for users across the globe. The company says it’s “investigating” the issue.

Microsoft’s search engine Bing was not working for users across the globe. According to Downdetector, an online platform providing information about the status of various websites and services, first reports about the issue started pouring in the early hours of May 23rd.

“We are working to restore access to a limited number of our services,” Microsoft spokesperson told Cybernews.

Around mid day, Microsoft's Status account on X said the company is broadening it's mitigation efforts after partly recovering Copilot and other features.

“We're closely monitoring to determine if further actions are needed to resolve the issue,” the company said.

What happened to Bing?

The May 23 outage impacted Copilot, with users receiving “We’re sorry but we’re unable to connect to the service at this time” message. Microsoft posted a message on X, saying it is aware of the issue.

“We're investigating an issue where users may be unable to access the Microsoft Copilot service. We're working to isolate the cause of the issue,” the company said in post on X.

Copilot has been down for several hours now and nobody has noticed. pic.twitter.com/Lcr6Yp9z92

undefined Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog) May 23, 2024

While Microsoft did not specify the nature of the problem it is likely related to Bing’s application programming interface (API) as other services that rely on Bing were impacted to. For example, at the time of writing DuckDuckGo search engine was unresponsive

According to global internet monitoring site NetBlocks, the Bing outage has also affected ChatGPT search, which is only available to Plus or corporate users. Ecosia and Qwant search engines also appear to be affected by the Bing's outage.

ℹ️ Note: Microsoft’s search engine Bing is currently experiencing international outages, particularly impacting CoPilot, ChatGPT and DuckDuckGo; incident not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering #BingDown pic.twitter.com/JrDuCE60of

undefined NetBlocks (@netblocks) May 23, 2024

"We're currently experiencing an issue with DuckDuckGo Search that might prevent you from getting results," DuckDuckGo shared on its official X account.

Three hours after Microsoft posted a message that the company is working on a fix, it published another post on X, saying that the tech behemoth will transition requests to alternative service components to mitigate the issue.

Tech pundits on X noted that the outage underscores how the growing use of Bing API, evident by multiple services unable to operate once Microsoft ran into problems.