Microsoft servers go down for four hours and leave Copilot, Bing and DuckDuckGo silent

The cloud is ethereal, but it actually “lives” on very physical servers. When they go down… AI and other services collapse like a house of cards.

If you have asked Copilot something today, and he has remained as silent as a mummy, you are not the only one. for four hours Microsoft servers have gone down, which has caused services associated with searches to stop working, such as the aforementioned Copilot, Bingand third-party platforms such as the DuckDuckGo search engine.

Outages of large Internet cloud hosting services, such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc., occur from time to time, although they do not usually last as many hours.

This problem demonstrates one of the weaknesses of the Internet: The vast majority of online services and websites are hosted on just a handful of platforms.. If one of them goes down, a multitude of seemingly unrelated services and websites are disabled.

Copilot and Bing, KO for four hours

This is what happened today, after the Microsoft servers associated with search services, both our own and those of others, went down.

Copilot and Bing belong to Microsoft. No, DuckDuckGo is a rival search engine to Bing, but it is hosted on Microsoft servers, and that is why it has also gone down, as its creators have confirmed. in X.

As we see in these graphs of DownDetectorboth DuckDuckGo and Bing have generated problems around the same time, between 8 in the morning and 4 in the afternoon today, Spanish time:

These problems have occurred worldwide, there has been a general drop throughout the world, since the failure was in the hosting itself, that is, the Microsoft servers.

The service was restored in the early afternoon. Microsoft has not explained what caused the fall, even though it lasted at least four hours.

During this time, Copilot has remained mute, he did not respond to the prompts. The same has happened with searches on Bing, which did not offer results.

This ruling is a prelude to what can happen when AI is implemented everywhere: a server outage can make AIs go mute.

It will be a big problem if a company depends too much on these virtual “assistants”. They will have to establish a plan B, in case the AI ​​goes down. Something that, currently, is not being done…

One of the solutions is to use artificial intelligence locally, that is, it works directly on the computer hardware. This requires a PC with an NPU or AI chip, which will begin to go on sale this summer.

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Tags: Artificial intelligence, Microsoft