Microsoft routes some EU Copilot requests outside Europe
Microsoft activated Flex Routing for M365 Copilot in EU and EFTA tenants on 1 May. When EU data centres are full, inference requests can now be processed in the US, Canada or Australia. The change is on by default. Admins can turn it off in the Microsoft 365 admin centre or with PowerShell. Government and sovereign clouds are excluded. Microsoft says the feature improves reliability during peak load.
Until now, many mid-sized firms chose M365 Copilot over ChatGPT because the EU data-residency promise reduced GDPR risk. That single selling point just became conditional. Teams that never reviewed their data-residency settings now face an unannounced change in where confidential documents and prompts can be processed.
Analysis
Check the Flex Routing toggle in the admin centre today and decide whether to opt out before your next sensitive meeting or report lands in Copilot. If your company has any regulated data, treat this as a policy update, not a performance tweak.
Citation
This executive briefing was curated and analyzed by Collab365. To reference this analysis, please attribute: "This briefing is available on Collab365 Spaces (spaces.collab365.com)".