You ruined Co-Pilot. Well done

There are recent reports matching the loss of context, document-reading failures, and off-topic answers, but Microsoft has not publicly confirmed a general Microsoft 365 Copilot incident for this exact behavior; capture a minimal reproduction and submit it through your tenant’s service channel.

Check whether Microsoft has identified a tenant-specific incident

A public status page can show everything operational while an advisory affects only particular tenants.

1. Ask a Microsoft 365 Service Support admin, Helpdesk admin, or Global admin to open: Microsoft 365 admin center → Health → Service health.
2. Review:
   • Active issues Microsoft is working on
   • Issues for your organization to act on
   • Issue history for the previous 7 or 30 days
3. Check Health → Message center for rollout or Copilot-change announcements.

Those roles can view tenant-specific service information that might not appear on the public status page.^1^ The public Microsoft 365 status currently does not identify the particular “uploaded documents ignored/tangential answers” problem as a broad outage.^2^

Produce one clean failure report

Avoid sending only a general quality complaint; give engineering a repeatable case:

1. Start a new chat.
2. Upload one small, unprotected DOCX or PDF containing a distinctive sentence.
3. Ask:
   • “Quote the sentence containing [distinctive phrase].”
   • “State the page or section where it appears.”
   • “Use only the attached file. If it cannot be read, say so.”
4. Record:
   • Exact timestamp and time zone
   • Copilot surface: Microsoft 365 Copilot app, Word, Teams, web, Windows, or mobile
   • Work/school or personal account
   • File type and approximate size
   • Prompt and incorrect response
   • Whether the same test fails in both the app and browser
   • Screenshot, with confidential information removed

For each wrong answer, select Thumbs down and describe the document-grounding error. Microsoft specifically directs users to use this control for incorrect Copilot Chat answers.^3^

For a business-critical Microsoft 365 case, an administrator should then use:

Microsoft 365 admin center → Support → Help & Support → Support Assistant / Service request

Microsoft documents that route for Microsoft 365 Copilot service and development issues.^4^

If this is the updated personal Copilot app

Microsoft acknowledges that functionality gaps can occur while the updated personal Copilot experience rolls out. Report the issue from:

… → Send feedback → Report a problem

Include when it began, the device and operating system, and a screenshot.^5^

If “ingesting documents” means a Copilot Studio agent

Check the knowledge source status before testing. A newly added source can briefly show Ready, change to In Progress, and only becomes usable after returning to Ready. Password-protected documents and documents labeled confidential or highly confidential can appear ready yet provide no answers.^6^

For files supplied directly by an agent user, an agent without code interpreter reads up to 30,000 extracted text characters per file and in total across multiple files. If an Office document exceeds that limit, its content can be discarded and the agent may behave as though no file was supplied. Split the document or enable code interpreter where applicable; this particular character limit does not apply to PDFs.^7^

These Copilot Studio limits should not be applied to ordinary Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat unless the failing experience is actually a Studio-built agent.

References

1. How to check Microsoft 365 service health
2. Service Health Status - Microsoft
3. Frequently asked questions about Microsoft Copilot Chat | Microsoft Support
4. Support and feedback
5. Troubleshoot Your Content in the Updated Copilot App | Microsoft Support
6. Quotas and limits
7. Allow file input from users