Thousands of users in the United Kingdom and across Europe found themselves unable to use Microsoft Copilot as the platform suffered a widespread outage on Tuesday. According to the firm’s status alert, many were either unable to log in to the tool or experienced broken features, rendering key productivity functions within Microsoft 365 unusable.
Analysts monitoring service disruptions noted a dramatic surge in reports on outage-tracking platforms such as DownDetector, which logged hundreds of complaints in a short span, marking one of the most significant interruptions for Copilot in months. Users who could reach Copilot were often met with generic failure messages such as “Sorry, I wasn’t able to respond to that” or “Well, that wasn’t supposed to happen,” indicating a backend issue rather than isolated client glitches.
The company attributed the disruption to a sudden and unexpected spike in traffic that overwhelmed its autoscaling infrastructure. Service telemetry flagged capacity-scaling issues and load-balancing problems, prompting engineers to intervene by manually scaling resources and adjusting load-balancing rules. In an update, Microsoft confirmed that the incident might impact “any user within the United Kingdom, or Europe, attempting to access Copilot.”
Because Copilot is tightly integrated into core Microsoft 365 applications such as Word, Excel and Teams, the outage disrupted a wide range of workflows. Businesses relying on AI-driven automation for document drafting, summarisation and collaborative editing were abruptly deprived of these capabilities. The outage also underscored growing concerns about the reliability of generative-AI tools at scale, especially as enterprises lean increasingly on such systems for day-to-day operations.
At the time of writing, Microsoft’s teams had reportedly restored many functions by reverting problematic load-balancing configurations and incrementally increasing capacity across affected regions. However, some users and businesses continued to record sporadic failures and degraded AI responses, indicating that full service stability had not yet been universally re-established.
The interruption comes at a critical juncture for AI-powered business tools, as companies worldwide push to integrate automation into workflows. For many organisations in the UK and Europe, the outage translated into immediate disruption to productivity, raising fresh questions about infrastructure resilience and the risks associated with dependence on cloud-based AI services.
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