Microsoft Copilot Chat is not working. Error message "Looks like you do not have access to the Copilot. Contact your administrator to get access to Copilot."

Question

I am an admin at a company and our users have just started receiving this error message when attempting to reach Microsoft Copilot Chat. Each user either has a Microsoft E3 or Microsoft E5 license assigned to their account. We attempted to use the following URLS

M365copilot.com

Copilot.cloud.microsoft

Bing.com and the link to Copilot

They all receive the same error. We have tried using different browsers and clearing the cache. We have also signed out and reauthenticated, but the error persists.

From my understanding, all users with a Microsoft E3 or E5 license should have access to Copilot Chat. I am aware of the paid license version that provides access within Outlook and other Office apps, but that is not what I am trying to enable. Our users are accessing Copilot Chat via the website.

What settings should I check in our environment, or has Microsoft provided any guidance indicating that we now need to opt in?

Answer 1

I hope this will help someone else, what I ended up doing was revoking an affected user's Business Premium licence and waiting about half an hour before assigning the same licence again, then testing the user's access. I was sceptical about this as I'd already done the same thing last week, though at that point I only revoked the licence for a couple of minutes before reassigning it as they didn't want to lose access to Office and OneDrive for any length of time.

After waiting 30 minutes and reassigning the licence, the user was able to use Copilot chat again. I have tested this with one other user so far and had the same result, so it looks like patience and time may be required to apply this fix.

Answer 2

FYI, If found an answer in this topic: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/2264739/looks-like-you-do-not-have-access-to-the-copilot-c?source=docs