AI uprising postponed after Copilot falls off the web

Fears of an AI takeover remain unfounded after Microsoft demonstrated that Copilot can sometimes struggle to remain upright, let alone march over the remnants of humanity.

The copilot.microsoft.com website fell over for an hour and 40 minutes overnight, returning a Cloudflare Error 1016 message when users attempted to chat with the bot.

The outage lasted from 2225 UTC on September 9 until 0005 UTC on September 10.

At around the same time, the Microsoft 365 Copilot team ran a resilience test that had an unintended consequence: some users lost access to Copilot Chat's suggested prompts.

"Users may have been unable to see the suggestion pills after receiving a bot response in Copilot Chat," Microsoft said.

CopilotKit defines a "suggestion pill" as a "suggested prompt shown to the user (typically as a clickable pill)," rather than something Morpheus might offer Neo in The Matrix.

Microsoft eventually reported that the web outage had been resolved, writing: "We've diagnosed the issue occurring in the affected network flow and applied a configuration fix, which we've confirmed has fully restored copilot.microsoft.com access." Microsoft halted the resilience drill after detecting its effect on Copilot Chat.

"We're reviewing our internal drill procedures to better identify the potential for impact to suggestion pills in Copilot Chat prior to beginning the drill, so that we can prevent similar impact in the future," the company said.

Real programmers test in production, right? Both incidents were resolved, leaving humanity safe from Copilot for another day.

As one observer put it: "And they say AI is going to kill us all when they can't even keep it running." ®