Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET
Update on Tuesday, May 28 at 11 a.m. ET: After this story published, Microsoft confirmed that it suffered a 24-hour outage. On Friday, the company said that it had restored all the services and provided an update to Bleeping Computer on how the outage occurred.
“We’ve shared the following preliminary root cause with customers in admin center,” Microsoft told Bleeping Computer in a statement. “An internal service-to-service call within the underlying platform leveraged by Copilot and Bing traffic was not performing as expected in relation to a specific request that checks a user’s eligibility status.”
The company didn’t say how it fixed the problem or whether it put any safeguards in place to avoid such an issue from happening again. As of this writing, all Microsoft-backed services, including Copilot, Bing, ChatGPT, and DuckDuckGo, are operating as expected.
The original story follows below.
An apparent Microsoft outage has impacted a slew of services, including Bing, the company’s artificial intelligence assistant Copilot, ChatGPT, and more.
Several Bing users reported earlier on Thursday that the company’s Bing search engine was down. Those users also reported that they were having trouble using Microsoft’s Copilot and ChatGPT’s internet search. Microsoft has invested billions of dollars into OpenAI and the ChatGPT maker also uses Microsoft’s infrastructure. The private search engine DuckDuckGo, which isn’t owned by Microsoft but uses the Bing API, has also been affected.
In a Thursday post on X, Microsoft only commented on the Copilot outage, saying that it’s “working to isolate the cause of the issue.” For its part, OpenAI said on its status page that “ChatGPT’s ability to search the internet is being affected.” Neither company said when the services would be restored.
Microsoft, OpenAI, and DuckDuckGo did not immediately respond to a ZDNET request for comment on the outage and timeline on restoration.
Also: What is Copilot (formerly Bing Chat)? Here’s everything you need to know
As of this writing, I was able to access Bing without any trouble, and both ChatGPT and Copilot appear to be working fine. However, while DuckDuckGo’s homepage was able to load, when I tried searching on the platform, it wouldn’t return any results. Your mileage may vary. While I was able to access Copilot, ZDNET editor Emil Protalinski was only able to access Copilot on the web. When he tried accessing Copilot via the desktop and mobile apps, which worked for me, the service was down.
Outages are a common occurrence across a range of internet platforms, but when technology from a major provider like Microsoft is impacted, it can have profound and widespread effects. While it appears that this outage isn’t affecting every use of these platforms, there are enough users complaining that it appears to be widespread.
The outages are somewhat odd. According to BleepingComputer, which reported on the outage earlier, when Bing was down earlier this morning, only the homepage was down. If users went directly to the search page, the service worked fine. While ChatGPT was working fine for most queries, only its internet searching capabilities were affected.
For now, then, it appears that Microsoft is working on addressing the problem and at least some of the outages have been restored. Unfortunately, it’s unclear how long it’ll take before all services, including DuckDuckGo and ChatGPT’s internet search, will come back online. It’s also unclear if Microsoft will divulge why the services went down and whether it’s put any redundancies in place to ensure they don’t fall victim to the same issue in the future.
