Microsoft Copilot is "continuing to recover" from an extended Bing outage

Early this morning, online reports started popping up from people worldwide indicating that Microsoft's Bing search engine was offline. This downtime has persisted throughout the day and it has also affected services that use the Bing API including Microsoft's Copilot generative AI assistant.

Now we have what looks like a hopeful update on this current situation. The Microsoft 365 Status X account has been updated with a message posted at 2:21 pm Eastern time, specifically on the Copilot downtime. The message stated:

Our telemetry indicates that the service is continuing to recover. We're actively investigating the underlying cause of the issue and will take further mitigation actions as necessary.

Microsoft has not issued a comment explaining what happened to the Bing API today as of this writing. The Downdetector website site does show that the reports of Bing being out have gone down since this morning but they have still not gone down to their normal levels. In addition, many X users have posted word that Bing is still not working for them.

The Copilot outage is especially concerning since Microsoft used this week to officially announce and promote Copilot+ PC notebooks. These new Windows laptops from many major PC makers will put Copilot at the center of their features, driven by new CPUs that include neural-based AI chips.

The Bing API outage also reportedly took down ChatGPT's browser tool for a number of hours today. It also shut down theDuckDuckGo search engine which partially uses the Bing API, for a few hours as well.

However, the good news for DuckDuckGo search users is that its services are now back online, according to its own X post. DuckDuckGo has also not offered a detailed explanation for its shut down today.