Cognitive Services connection fails with "Server not responding" in Azure Communication Services

Question

Cognitive Services connection fails with "Server not responding" in Azure Communication Services

Hammad Wali 0

User's image

I'm trying to connect a Cognitive Services resource to my Azure Communication Services (ACS) resource, but the connection keeps failing.

Steps to reproduce:

Navigate to my ACS resource in the Azure Portal
Go to Cognitive Services (under the relevant blade)
Select my subscription
Click Connect cognitive services
In the connection popup, the subscription is selected correctly
The Resource group dropdown shows a spinner that spins indefinitely
Eventually the dialog becomes unresponsive and crashes

Error message received (intermittently):

Server not responding Unable to access Azure Cognitive Service now, please try again later.

Environment details:

Browser: Edge
Tried in incognito/private mode: yes
Tried a different browser: yes

What I've tried:

Refreshing the page and retrying

Has anyone else run into this, or is there a known issue with the Cognitive Services connection dialog in the ACS portal experience? Any workaround (e.g., via ARM template, PowerShell, or Azure CLI) would also be appreciated if the portal continues to fail.

Thanks in advance!

Abhinaba Das 105 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-08-05T00:44:14.1966667+00:00

Thank you for contacting us about the Server not responding in Azure Communication Services issue We have begun looking into it and will share our suggestions with you as soon as possible. If you have any additional details or concerns in the meantime, please let us know. We appreciate your patience while we work on this
Abhinaba Das 105 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-08-22T20:15:40.95+00:00

Hi @Hammad Wali

Thank you for the screenshots. The behavior shown here—where the Resource group list remains on a loading spinner and the dialog eventually returns “Server not responding”—indicates that the Azure portal connection experience is unable to complete the Azure AI Services resource discovery request.

Since you have already reproduced the issue in different browsers and private/incognito mode, this is unlikely to be caused by a browser cache or local session issue.

As a workaround, you can bypass the Connect cognitive service dialog and manually configure the connection:

Ensure that the Azure Communication Services resource has its system-assigned managed identity enabled.

Go to the ACS resource Identity blade and select Azure role assignments.

Add a role assignment with the Cognitive Services User role.

Set the scope to the resource group containing the Azure AI Services resource and assign the role to the ACS managed identity.

Also, please ensure that the target resource is a supported Azure AI Services multi-service resource, as this integration does not support connecting directly to an unsupported single-service Cognitive Services resource.

This manual configuration is the recommended alternative when the portal connection dialog cannot be used.

Reference:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/communication-services/concepts/call-automation/azure-communication-services-azure-cognitive-services-integration?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Kindly let us know if the above helps or if you need further assistance on this issue.

Please upvote if the information was helpful—this helps others in the community as well.

1 answer

Your answer

Abhinaba Das 105 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-08-05T00:44:14.1966667+00:00

Thank you for contacting us about the Server not responding in Azure Communication Services issue We have begun looking into it and will share our suggestions with you as soon as possible. If you have any additional details or concerns in the meantime, please let us know. We appreciate your patience while we work on this
Abhinaba Das 105 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-08-22T20:15:40.95+00:00

Hi @Hammad Wali

Thank you for the screenshots. The behavior shown here—where the Resource group list remains on a loading spinner and the dialog eventually returns “Server not responding”—indicates that the Azure portal connection experience is unable to complete the Azure AI Services resource discovery request.

Since you have already reproduced the issue in different browsers and private/incognito mode, this is unlikely to be caused by a browser cache or local session issue.

As a workaround, you can bypass the Connect cognitive service dialog and manually configure the connection:

Ensure that the Azure Communication Services resource has its system-assigned managed identity enabled.

Go to the ACS resource Identity blade and select Azure role assignments.

Add a role assignment with the Cognitive Services User role.

Set the scope to the resource group containing the Azure AI Services resource and assign the role to the ACS managed identity.

Also, please ensure that the target resource is a supported Azure AI Services multi-service resource, as this integration does not support connecting directly to an unsupported single-service Cognitive Services resource.

This manual configuration is the recommended alternative when the portal connection dialog cannot be used.

Reference:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/communication-services/concepts/call-automation/azure-communication-services-azure-cognitive-services-integration?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Kindly let us know if the above helps or if you need further assistance on this issue.

Please upvote if the information was helpful—this helps others in the community as well.

Answer 1

The portal flow is failing while enumerating Azure AI/Cognitive Services resources. For this ACS integration, the most important checks are:

Verify the Azure AI resource exists in the selected subscription and resource group.
Verify the Azure AI resource is a Multi-service Cognitive Services resource. This integration supports only Multi-service Cognitive Service resources.
Verify the ACS resource has permission to create role assignments: Microsoft.Authorization/roleAssignments/write.
Verify the ACS managed identity is enabled. In Azure Portal, open the ACS resource, go to Cognitive Services, and if system-assigned managed identity is not enabled, enable it first.
After managed identity is enabled, use Connect cognitive service, then select Subscription, Resource Group, and Resource.
Ensure the ACS managed identity is assigned the Cognitive Services User role on the Cognitive Services resource scope.

Since browser refresh, private mode, and another browser were already tried, the remaining likely causes from the available guidance are portal-side enumeration failure, missing/incorrect resource type, missing permissions, or a service-side issue.

A practical troubleshooting path is:

In Azure Portal, open the Azure AI/Cognitive Services resource directly and confirm it is present and healthy.
Confirm it is a Multi-service Cognitive Services resource. If it is not, create a Multi-service resource and use that for the ACS connection.
In the ACS resource, open Cognitive Services and enable the system-assigned managed identity if it is not already enabled.
Assign the Cognitive Services User role to the ACS managed identity on the Cognitive Services resource.
Retry the connection from the ACS Cognitive Services tab.
If the portal still hangs or shows Server not responding, check Azure Service Health first to determine whether there is an Azure Communication Services or Azure AI service incident affecting the region.

If the failure persists for multiple days, one accepted resolution path for similar portal enumeration failures was to raise an Azure Support request after identifying subscription or quota-related issues such as repeated 429 (Too Many Requests) behavior.

References: