Is Bing ChatGPT's AI Not Working For You? You Are Not Alone

Microsoft’s Bing chatbot has encountered issues, with an error appearing for some users, causing their queries to crash and burn – and this appears to be due to the AI’s popularity.

Mikhail Parakhin, Microsoft’s head of Advertising and Web Services, tweeted about the error, which informs users that something went wrong when they make a query, a rather unhelpful message (and the chatbot fails to produce any other response than this).

Please accept our apologies for the “Something went wrong” error message that some of you may have seen on Bing Chat. It is caused by five major factors related to increased load, three of which have been fixed and the other two have been mitigated. Please be patient with us.

March 1, 2023

There have been numerous reports on Twitter of users encountering this error (which are still coming in), and Parakhin explains that there are several causes relating to ‘increased load’ on the chatbot. In other words, the volume of queries directed at the ChatGPT-powered AI is occasionally causing Bing to capsize.

According to Parakhin, Microsoft has fixes for three of the five major causes, and mitigation for the other two is in the works.

In short, a cure for this ailment is on the way, so if you’re one of the unfortunate people who has made this mistake – and possibly continues to make it – your troubles should be over soon.

Analysis: Something is being fixed, hopefully quickly

Parakhin has been admirably transparent in keeping us up to date on what’s going on with the Bing AI, with regular tweets informing us of the chatbot’s progress.

Given that the root causes of this problem appear to have been identified and located, as well as fixes and workarounds, we’re betting on a quick resolution – hopefully. If previous updates are any indication, we’ll almost certainly hear about it from Parakhin.

Microsoft is hastening the chatbot’s rollout, and more users are almost certainly being recruited to chat with the AI via the latest Windows 11 update, which places the ChatGPT-powered Bing directly on the taskbar. (Well, sort of – there has been some debate about the implementation, which we discuss in depth here).

With the chatbot still in its early stages, it’s not surprising that the extra load on the AI’s shoulders has caused problems.

There will almost certainly be growing pains for the three new personalities that have just been introduced to Bing. These allow users to change the tone of the AI’s responses to be more chatty and creative, or more precise and dry (or somewhere in the middle).