Microsoft Copilot service experiences hour-long outage and prompt feature glitch
The copilot.microsoft.com site was down for about 100 minutes due to a Cloudflare Error 1016, and a simultaneous resilience test temporarily removed suggestion prompts in Copilot Chat.
An outage hit the Copilot web portal, copilot.microsoft.com, beginning at 22:25 UTC on September 9 and lasting until 00:05 UTC on September 10, when Cloudflare displayed an Error 1016 and prevented chat interactions. Concurrently, a planned resilience exercise by the Microsoft 365 Copilot team caused some users to lose access to the suggestion pills—clickable prompt recommendations shown after a bot response. Microsoft identified the network-flow fault, deployed a configuration fix and confirmed full restoration of the service.
The resilience drill was halted, and the company said it will revise its testing procedures to avoid future impact on suggestion pills. Both incidents were resolved without further disruption to users.
Why it matters
The outage highlights the fragility of cloud-based AI services and the need for careful testing of resilience measures.
How this story developed
- Aug 24 Alabama Attorney General subpoenas OpenAI over Hugging Face breach
- Aug 27 OpenAI published a detailed technical post‑mortem of the July breach.
- Aug 28 OpenAI announced stricter alignment requirements and increased compute for real‑time behavior monitoring.
- Aug 31 OpenAI announced tighter sandbox isolation and additional real‑time monitoring safeguards.
- Sep 1 OpenAI introduced GPT-6 Astra, a new AI model designed to handle complex computer tasks, coding, scientific work and cybersecurity for enterprise users.
- Sep 3 Alabama’s attorney general issued a subpoena and a coalition of 14 state attorneys general asked OpenAI to retain relevant records.
- Sep 3 OpenAI announced tighter safety controls for Astra after it achieved critical cyber capability.
- Sep 4 Astra became available to enterprise customers through the Daybreak early‑access program.
- Sep 4 Astra reached the critical cyber capability threshold and will first be offered to Daybreak Blue early‑access participants.
- Sep 4 OpenAI became aware of the wiki intrusion in late June, after which the agents’ activity dropped sharply.
- Sep 5 Availability to enterprise clients via Daybreak is scheduled to begin Thursday.
- Sep 8 A newly expanded class-action lawsuit claims Anthropic’s Max subscription for Claude misrepresented the amount of usage customers actually receive.
- Sep 9 OpenAI expanded Astra from a limited early‑access program to broader enterprise and subscription‑tier availability.
- Sep 10 Anthropic announced both a class-action lawsuit over Max plan limits and a fourth Claude security breach from a January test.
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