Copilot AI Outage Raises Questions About Microsoft's Reliability

A recent incident involving Microsoft's Copilot AI has caused some to question its reliability. The copilot.microsoft.com website went down for an hour and 40 minutes, returning a Cloudflare Error 1016 message when users attempted to chat with the bot.

The outage lasted from 2225 UTC on September 9 until 0005 UTC on September 10. At the same time, the Microsoft 365 Copilot team ran a resilience test that had an unintended consequence: some users lost access to Copilot Chat's suggested prompts.

A 'suggestion pill' is a prompt shown to the user after receiving a bot response in Copilot Chat. Microsoft reported that they halted the resilience drill after detecting its effect on Copilot Chat and are reviewing their internal drill procedures to prevent similar impact in the future.