Microsoft is investigating a major Copilot outage affecting users across the UK and Europe, leaving some without access and others with degraded functionality.

In an initial post to social media, the tech firm said that an “unexpected increase in traffic” was to blame, though later clarified that the outage was due to an issue impacting service autoscaling to meet high demand.

But minutes later, while manually scaling up capacity, Microsoft admitted to discovering a separate issue adding to Copilot’s problems, this time with load balancing, which required yet another fix.   

“We’re conducting changes to load balancing rules to reduce the overall load on the most heavily impacted components by diverting traffic to healthier infrastructure. Additionally, we’re performing targeted restarts on the affected infrastructure to alleviate impact,” said the latest update, which directs users to service alert CP1193544 in the admin centre.

At time of writing, the system is flickering on and off, with users attempting to use Copilot still being met with the message “Well, that wasn’t supposed to happen” or “Sorry, I wasn’t able to respond to that”, with the AI assistant saying it’s unable to connect with the server.

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While Microsoft’s engineers scramble to find a fix, this isn’t the first time this month that the tech firm has faced the wrath of Office 365 users.

Last week, the company said it was investigating an issue with its Microsoft Defender portal after users complained of having limited access, and in November, another short-lived issue with Copilot meant users couldn’t perform any file actions.

This is a developing story, check back for updates.