UK Copilot users faced “degraded” service on Tuesday, which Microsoft blamed on its infrastructure hitting capacity limits amid high demand.
An “unexpected increase in traffic has resulted in impact” Microsoft said – later pointing to “an issue impacting service autoscaling to meet demand.”
“We're manually scaling capacity to improve service availability,” it added in a service update, saying that this had triggered a “separate issue affecting load balancing, which is also contributing to the overall impact…
Microsoft said it was making changes to load balancing rules to “reduce the overall load on the most heavily impacted components by diverting traffic to healthier infrastructure,” as The Stack published, and “performing targeted restarts on the affected infrastructure to alleviate impact.”
Yes, “turning it off and on again” works at AI infrastructure scale too.
It first acknowledged the incident shortly after 10:00, UK time and had not resolved it three hours later. Users in the Netherlands also reported impact.
Similar notable Microsoft outages in recent years have been blamed on buggy software updates and during its most significant outage of 2024, an incident was triggered “during a decommissioning workflow for an internal Microsoft 365 backend service. Before the service was decommissioned, traffic to the service was not disabled as expected. As a result, once the service was removed, other services continued to send traffic to it.”
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