Microsoft 365 Alert – Service Degradation – Microsoft Copilot (Microsoft 365) – Users can’t prompt the Researcher agent in Microsoft Copilot (Microsoft 365) and receive an error – RESOLVED

12/02/2026 08:43:00 AM

NHSmail Reference: INC46748193

Microsoft Reference: CP1230733

Issue Status: RESOLVED

Issue Description: Users can’t prompt the Researcher agent in Microsoft Copilot (Microsoft 365) and receive an error

More info: When users send a prompt to the Researcher agent in Copilot, they receive an error that states: “We’re experiencing high demand. Please try again later.”

Final Update: 20/02/2026 08:55:00 AM –Microsoft has concluded our extended monitoring of the service during peak business hours following our traffic and performance optimizations, and they have confirmed that impact has been resolved by their actions.

Scope of impact: Your organization is affected by this event, and any user attempting to send prompts to the Researcher agent in Copilot is impacted.

Root cause: A recent general back-end service maintenance operation, designed to rebalance request traffic to maintain overall service health, is causing the portion of service infrastructure responsible for facilitating responses from the Researcher agent in Copilot to operate in a suboptimal state.

Next steps: Microsoft will continue to monitor the service health and assess what further traffic flow changes can be made in an effort to prevent similar issues from occurring in the future.