Users across Europe have been unable to access Microsoft’s AI-powered Copilot digital assistant due to an ongoing issue, which the company is addressing.
Also, Microsoft announced by acknowledging that it was looking into a major Copilot outage that occurred in the UK and Europe on Tuesday, December 9, 2025. The interruption was mostly brought on by an unforeseen increase in traffic. Users had reduced functioning or were unable to use the AI assistant as a result of the problem.
The outage had impact customers in the UK or Europe who are unable to access copilot.cloud.microsoft, m365.cloud.microsoft, the Copilot button in the Edge browser, or Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 apps, according to a service alert (CP1193544) that BleepingComputer was able to view.
The causes of the service interruption were determined to be an unanticipated spike in demand and a related load balancing problem.
The identified symptom states that the bot couldn’t connect to the server, and users reported seeing error messages like “Sorry, I wasn’t able to respond to that.” The specialised website DownDetector had more than 1,000 user reports.
As seen above, Downdetector marks an outage only when problem reports exceed the normal baseline for that time of day, and the report volume here was significantly elevated.
The services affected explains that the Copilot for Microsoft 365, button in the Edge browser, and the m365.cloud.microsoft and copilot.cloud.microsoft site addresses were all affected by the outage.
Users that were affected are seeing “Sorry, I wasn’t able to respond to that. Is there something else I can help with?” However, those who are able to access the impacted service could find that certain functionalities are less functioning.
Microsoft recognised the problem an hour ago and stated, “We’re investigating an issue in which users in the United Kingdom may be unable to access Microsoft Copilot, or experience degraded functionality with certain features.”
Microsoft said that the event was brought on by a capacity scaling problem that is now being fixed after examining service monitoring information to determine the outage’s primary cause.
Microsoft stated that Telemetry from service monitoring indicates that an unanticipated spike in traffic has had an impact. We’re still looking into this to figure out what needs to be done next.
“We’ve found a problem affecting the autoscaling of services to satisfy demand. To increase service availability, we’re manually increasing capacity, and we’re keeping a careful eye on this to make sure the desired result is attained.”
In response, Microsoft announced that it was working on expanding capacity to match demand and modifying load balancing procedures to provide relief via the official Microsoft 365 status account on X (previously Twitter).
Additionally, Microsoft is monitoring a different incident (DZ1193516) that is causing certain administrators to encounter problems when attempting to utilise Microsoft Defender for Endpoint capabilities, such as threat analytics and device inventory. Although the number of impacted users has not yet been disclosed, the problem has been marked as an incident in the admin centre, which often indicates service issues that have a major impact on users.
Additionally, Microsoft resolved an outage that prevented users from accessing some Defender XDR portal features, such as threat hunting notifications, a week ago.
The update as at December 09, 07:54 EST says that Microsoft has determined that the Copilot incident was caused by a different problem that is exacerbating the overall impact by creating load-balancing issues.
“We’ve discovered a different problem that affects load balancing and adds to the overall effect. To alleviate the situation, we are modifying our load balancing guidelines. In order to fulfil demand, we’re still working on expanding capacity,” Microsoft stated.
Also an update December 09, 13:42 EST: According to Microsoft, the issue has been fixed by undoing a recent policy change that had an impact on service traffic balance.
It also said that thy have successfully reverted the policy change in all affected environments and our telemetry confirms that the impact is fully resolved.
The official Microsoft 365 service health status site allows users to see the current state of Microsoft services.
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