Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Hi there!

You're not alone — this is a confirmed issue with two separate causes worth addressing.

⚠️ First: there is an active Microsoft service degradation right now

Microsoft has confirmed a service degradation where Copilot Studio users are not receiving search results with SharePoint as a knowledge source. Their investigation identified that a recent service update contained a regression. Microsoft is reverting the update on the affected service nodes to mitigate the impact. NHSmail This may be the direct cause of the sudden break you experienced. Check your Microsoft 365 admin center under Health → Service health for the latest status.

✅ Beyond the incident — the structural cause to fix

Even once the incident is resolved, your setup has a permissions design issue that will likely cause it to break again.

Generative answers over SharePoint rely on delegated permissions when searching. Microsoft Learn This means the bot fetches content on behalf of each signed-in user, not with a global service account. When you publish your agent, the calls using generative answers are made on behalf of the user chatting with the agent, using the authentication settings configured in the agent. Microsoft Learn

So "everyone in the org has access to the SharePoint site" is not enough — the user's identity must be able to authenticate against SharePoint through the bot's auth flow.

Here's what to verify:

Authentication method: If Restricted SharePoint Search is enabled in your tenant, use of SharePoint as a knowledge source is blocked entirely. Microsoft Learn Ask your SharePoint admin to check this setting.

OAuth scopes: When configuring manual authentication, you must specify Sites.Read.All and Files.Read.All in the scopes field in Copilot Studio. These scopes don't give users increased permissions, but allow their permissible SharePoint content to be accessed for generative answers. Microsoft Learn

Use "Authenticate with Microsoft": By default, agents created in Copilot Studio are configured with the Authenticate with Microsoft option, which works in Teams, Power Apps, and Microsoft 365 Copilot without requiring manual authentication setup. Microsoft Learn If you changed this to manual or another method, switching back is the safest fix.

Check for recently uploaded files: It's possible that documents were recently uploaded to SharePoint but have not yet been indexed. It's also possible that there are settings preventing some sites from appearing in search results. Microsoft Learn

In short: wait for the Microsoft rollback to complete, then verify the delegated auth setup is correct.

Hope this helps!
Paolo

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