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

12/02/2026 08:43:00 AM

NHSmail Reference: INC46748193

Microsoft Reference: CP1230733

Issue Status: ONGOING

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.”

Current Update: 18/02/2026 08:45:00 AM –Microsoft are observing continued improvements as a result of our optimizations, they are continuing to monitor service telemetry to ensure this issue is no longer occurring during peak business hours and that no further mitigative action is necessary to resolve this problem.

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 update by: Wednesday, February 20, 2026, at 2:00 AM UTC