The promise of the AI-powered workplace hit a stumbling block across the UK and Europe today, as Microsoft’s Copilot service suffered a major outage, leaving thousands of corporate users staring at error messages rather than the automated drafts and
The disruption caused by Microsoft downtime, which began early on Tuesday morning, has effectively lobotomized the productivity suites of businesses across the continent. Users attempting to access the AI assistant within Microsoft 365 apps—including Word, Excel, and Teams—were met with a polite but obstinate refusal: "Sorry, I wasn't able to respond to that. Is there something else I can help with?"
For many, the answer was a frustrated "no", as the digital silence highlighted just how rapidly the corporate world has tethered its daily operations to generative AI.
‘Unexpected increase in traffic’
Microsoft confirmed the issue in a statement posted to X (formerly Twitter), attributing the failure to a surge in demand that its infrastructure struggled to handle.
“Upon an initial investigation, we've identified this issue may impact any user within the United Kingdom, or Europe, attempting to access Microsoft Copilot,” the company stated. “Indications from service monitoring telemetry suggest an unexpected increase in traffic has resulted in impact.”
The technology giant later clarified that while its automated systems attempted to scale up to meet this demand, a secondary issue with "load balancing"—the traffic police of the server world—compounded the failure, leaving the service unable to route requests to healthy infrastructure. The incident has been logged under the tracking code CP1193544, a string of characters now likely etched into the minds of IT administrators from London to Berlin.
Is the Copilot outage caused by its own expansion?
While Microsoft has not explicitly named the source of the traffic spike, industry observers point to the company’s aggressive democratisation of the tool in recent days. Just last week, between 1 and 4 December, Microsoft rolled out new, lower-cost "Business" tiers for Copilot, specifically targeting Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) who were previously priced out of the enterprise-grade offering.
It is highly probable that today’s blackout is the digital equivalent of a run on the banks—a massive influx of new, smaller business users testing their new tools simultaneously, creating a "thundering herd" effect that the existing architecture was ill-equipped to absorb.
The fragility of the AI workflow
The outage has reignited the debate surrounding the resilience of cloud-based AI in critical business infrastructure. Unlike a traditional software crash, which might isolate a single user, a cloud-side AI failure removes functionality from the entire workforce simultaneously.
On monitoring site DownDetector, reports of the outage spiked sharply at 9:00 am GMT, coinciding with the start of the working day. Social media was quickly awash with screenshots of the error message, with office workers sharing tales of having to revert to manual note-taking and unassisted email drafting—skills that, for some, are already beginning to atrophy in the shadow of automation.
Current status
As of Tuesday afternoon, Microsoft engineers are engaged in a manual scaling operation, attempting to increase capacity and adjust traffic rules to bypass the bottleneck. While some users have reported a flickering return of service, the stability of Copilot remains volatile across the region.
For a technology sector attempting to convince the world that AI is ready to be the backbone of the future economy, today serves as a stark reminder: even the most intelligent systems are only as smart as the servers they run on.
