Microsoft Copilot repaired worldwide after 24-hour outage

After an outage of more than 24 hours, Microsoft’s Bing, Copilot and Copilot in Windows services are back online worldwide, with no information released about the cause of the problem.

The massive outage began around 3 a.m. ET on Thursday and primarily affected users in Asia and Europe, making it impossible for many to access these services.

During the outage, Bing.com displayed either a blank page or an HTTP code 429 error, although searching directly on Bing still worked.

DuckDuckGo, which uses Bing AI, was also offline with an error message: “An error occurred while displaying search results. Please try again.”

ChatGPT’s internet search features, powered by Bing, were also down, as confirmed by OpenAI.

Microsoft shared updates throughout the day, initially stating: “We are working to find the cause of the issue. More information can be found in the Admin Center under CP795190.”

The company later said it was shifting requests to alternative service components to speed recovery.

Slowly, services began to return, with DuckDuckGo being the first to work again, followed by a partial recovery of Bing.com and Copilot.

Microsoft telemetry data showed a steady recovery, with investigations underway to determine the root cause. However, even today, users outside the United States have reported being unable to use Copilot.

Today, around 1:30 p.m. EST, Microsoft announced that the Bing and Copilot services were fully restored, which BleepingComputer confirmed in our own testing.

Android, iOS, and Windows apps, which were also experiencing issues, have started working again.

In a statement to BleepingComputer, Microsoft confirmed that the issue had been resolved and was caused by an issue with an internal service-to-service call.

“We have shared the following preliminary root cause with customers in the admin center: An internal service-to-service call within the underlying platform operated by Copilot and Bing traffic was not working as expected in relation to to a specific request that checks a user’s eligibility status,” a Microsoft spokesperson told us.