‘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 has been experiencing an outage.
The Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant published a note online saying that Microsoft Copilot desktop and web application may not be accessible by some users.
“We’ve received logs from impacted users and are reviewing them to identify the root cause,” according to the bulletin. “We’re also continuing to monitor our telemetry to determine mitigating actions we can implement in the interim as our investigation progresses.”
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Microsoft Confirms Copilot Outage
CRN has reached out to Microsoft for comment. The bulletin said the incident started at 1:55 p.m. UTC Monday. Microsoft last updated the bulletin at 4:46 p.m. UTC and expects to update the bulletin again at 6 pm U.T.C.
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.”
More than 400 users reported a Copilot outage to online outage detection website Downdetector as of 9:23 a.m. Pacific Monday. Reports of a Microsoft 365 outage reached 812 by 6:07 a.m. Pacific Monday but had fallen to more than 100 by 9:37 a.m. Copilot users can buy the AI tool as part of the M365 package of applications and services.
