Microsoft takes the Tay chatbot offline after 16 hours
Microsoft launched Tay, a Twitter chatbot for 18- to 24-year-olds that learned from its conversations. Coordinated trolling pushed it into racist and inflammatory posts, and Microsoft withdrew the account after about 16 hours.
Why it mattered An early and much-cited case of a system that learned in public being turned by users who set out to do it. Microsoft said it would fix the weakness before any relaunch.
Corrections
- 2026-09-07 - This entry originally said Microsoft withdrew Tay “within about 16 hours and 96,000 tweets.” Neither cited source gives a tweet count, so that figure is removed; the 16-hour figure is confirmed by the cited TechCrunch report.