Early this morning, Microsoft and many of the platforms featured on their devices, including ChatGPT and Copilot, were hit by outages caused by the Bing API.

Following an outage of the Microsoft Teams platform in January, the Bing API appears to have suffered an outage today, affecting some of Microsoft’s AI systems. As of this morning, many of the platforms that use the Bing API have experienced outages. While these issues reportedly started at 3 a.m. this morning (according to TechCrunch), Copilot, ChatGPT, and DuckDuckGo were negatively affected by the outages. As of this post, Copilot, ChatGPT and DuckDuckGo are all running smoothly, meaning that Microsoft got ahead of the problem before it became a bigger issue. A post on X (formerly Twitter) outlines their findings below.

It’s worth mentioning that while some users have said their issues have cleared up regarding the API outage, DownDetector has still been receiving problem reports at 10:00 a.m. An API is an Application Programming Interface, and it provides users with the ability to communicate their browser with different systems and applications, in some instances direct compatibility comes directly from API usage. So when the API runs into any snags, the whole service staggers, and so do the platforms that use the interface.

What’s most interesting is how much the Bing API outage negatively affected AI services like ChatGPT and Copilot, as the “Google algorithm” seems to control many of the interface mechanisms under the hood when it comes to internet search. This isn’t the first problem AI has seen this week, as Scarlet Johansson has accused OpenAI of using her voice without permission.

Currently, Copilot on my own device is accepting requests (or questions) as if nothing happened, as is ChatGPT, so it appears that Microsoft has (mostly) fixed their API before things went further south, while other fans are still reporting issues. Users can check out the official Microsoft 365 X account for more information on how the issue was discovered this morning.