Microsoft Rewards 'Read to Earn' feature missing for many users

If you opened the Bing app today and felt like something was missing, you aren’t going crazy. The “Read to Earn” feature — usually an easy way to grab 30 points just by scrolling through news headlines — seems to have vanished into thin air for just about everyone.

It’s a frustrating morning for those trying to keep their streaks alive, as the option has completely disappeared from the dashboard without any warning or explanation from Microsoft.

A quick look at the community discussions on Reddit shows reports piling in from all over the map. Users in the UK, US, Canada, and Australia confirmed the feature is gone. The outage covers most of Europe too, with confirmation coming in from France, Spain, Germany, and Italy.

One user, starruru, mentioned that the feature actually disappeared while they were in the middle of using it, which suggests a server-side change happened in real-time rather than a scheduled update.

It looks like the removal of the reading bonus is part of a bigger system hiccup. The point counters are behaving erratically for a lot of people. In a separate thread, user beorn5606 noted that their app was displaying wild totals, showing a daily cap of 1410 points before resetting to zero.

Others, like ColdRainNight, are seeing display errors where their progress reads “xx/1135” instead of the usual limit. It seems the entire rewards tracking system is having a bit of a meltdown, leading to incorrect totals and missing activities.

While it’s easy to worry that Microsoft might be quietly nerfing the program again, the chaotic nature of these bugs points more toward a technical error. As user FidgitForgotHisL-P speculated, it looks like someone might be “tinkering with the live code” and accidentally broke the public build.

For now, there isn’t much to do other than wait for the engineers to revert the changes or patch the dashboard. Hopefully, the feature returns once the dust settles.

We stand out from the tech-media crowd because we break news stories; we mainly bring you stuff that you won’t find anywhere in the mainstream tech media. Our stories have been picked up by some of the world’s most popular websites and media outlets—more info is available here.