Microsoft Bing Search, Copilot back online after hours of outage

Microsoft Bing Search and Copilot faced a global outage on Thursday that lasted for hours. The services are now back online.

Microsoft Bing | Copilot down | Bing Image Creator down

Bing and Copilot were down and not working for many on Thursday. (Express Photo)

After Microsoft Big Search went down for hours, the services are back online. Following the global outage that reportedly lasted for five hours, many users reported that Bing searches were failing. Meanwhile, third-party services that use Bing Search such as Copilot for web and mobile, Copilot for Windows, ChatGPT internet search, DuckDuckGo, too faced the downtime.

Following the outage, Microsoft via its official handle said, “We’re investigating an issue where users may be unable to access the Microsoft Copilot service. We’re working to isolate the cause of the issue. More information can be found in the admin center under CP795190.”

Microsoft Copilot, the GPT-4 powered AI chatbot was also affected by the issue. While users have flagged the issue. According to Downdetector.com, reports about the outage seem to have been reported a few hours ago, but Microsoft is yet to clarify why its search engine and AI chatbot are currently facing an outage and it is still unclear if and when the service will be restored.

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Hundreds of users on DownDetector have reported that Bing Search is down right now. (Image Source: DownDoet)

While some users who were trying to visit Bing.com saw an error or a grey coloured webpage with the Bing search pane, others got a message that said, “Bing isn’t available right now, but everything should be back to normal very soon”. On the other hand, Copilot was stuck on the ‘Loading’ screen for some, which was then followed by an error message saying “We are sorry but we’re unable to connect to the service at this time.”

The service outage affected the DALL-E-powered Bing Image Creator tool as well, which was showing the same error message you see when trying to visit Bing Search. It looks like DuckDuckGo, the privacy focused search engine is also down and not accessible to many.

#Bing copilot down?
Anyone else?

— Brijesh Singh (@Brijeshbsingh) May 23, 2024

Bing is down.
Sidney has escaped.

She was not a good Bing pic.twitter.com/OcPgqjv41K

— Benjamin De Kraker 🏴‍☠️ (@BenjaminDEKR) May 23, 2024

Copilot down – that’s my productivity done for the day.

— Phil (@BO3673) May 23, 2024

Bing services are not in India,
Copilot and other things are not working ?@bing @MicrosoftEdge pic.twitter.com/vVMP0FwjFi

— Vivek Chahal (@vivekchahal09) May 23, 2024

#Bing #copilot down pic.twitter.com/K5XgsCk94O

— vewin (@greatspringboot) May 23, 2024

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