What you need to know
- Bing Chat appears to be down around the world as users are unable to generate responses from Microsoft's AI chatbot.
- The site loads fine, as does the Edge Sidebar, but queries can't be processed and throw a connection error.
- Bing Image Creator appears to be fine, however, based on the DALLE-2 AI image generation tool from OpenAI.
- Update: Bing Chat appears to be working again, though we're seeing a little weird behavior still.
Update September 15, 9.45am ET: Bing Chat appears to be working again now, mostly, though we are still seeing some odd behavior. For example, I can't load the Bing Chat website, despite colleagues being able to, as it diverts to a web search for "Bing AI" instead. But access through the Edge Sidebar at least seems to have returned. Access through the Bing Mobile app also seems to still be struggling, as I'm getting network issues there, but colleagues elsewhere can access it fine.
If you're trying to use Bing Chat this morning and getting thrown a connection error, then you're not alone. The Windows Central team hasn't been able to use the service this morning, and it doesn't take much searching on X, the artist formerly known as Twitter, to see that it appears to be widespread and not isolated to a single region.
Indeed, we're able to verify first hand that Bing Chat isn't working in Europe and Africa, alongside the issues others are reporting. Likewise, DownDetector is starting to see a spike in reports of issues related to Bing.
The slightly better news is that it appears to be isolated only to Bing Chat. The regular Bing Search engine is working fine, as is Bing Image Creator. There's not been any official update right now from Microsoft as to what's going on and when it might be fixed, so for the time being, we just have to sit tight and wait it out.
The outage also seems to extend to Bing Chat Enterprise, which is potentially more frustrating for business users who are relying on the service. In the meantime, ChatGPT still seems to be working fine, at least the GPT 3.5 model, as I'm unable to test GPT-4 right now without a subscription.
We'll keep an eye on things and update as and when we learn more. But it looks like we're back to the old-fashioned way of searching the web for the time being.
