Abstract. Let G be a group admitting a non-elementary acylindrical action on a Gromov hyperbolic space (for example, a non-elementary relatively hyperbolic group, or the mapping class group of a closed hyperbolic surface, or Out(Fn) for n ≥ 2). We prove that, in degree 3, the bounded cohomology of G with real coefficients is infinite-dimensional. Our proof is based on an extension to higher degrees of a recent result by Hull and Osin. Namely, we prove that, if H is a hyperbolically embedded subgroup of G and V is any R[G]-module, then any n-quasi cocycle on H with values in V may be extended to G. Also, we show that our extensions detect the geometry of the embedding of hyperbolically embedded subgroups, in a suitable sense.Bounded cohomology of discrete groups is very hard to compute. For example, as observed in [Mon06], there is not a single countable group G whose bounded cohomology (with trivial coefficients) is known in every degree, unless it is known to vanish in all positive degrees (this is the case, for example, of amenable groups). Even worse, no group G is known for which the supremum of the degrees n such that H n b (G, R) = 0 is positive and finite.In degree 2, bounded cohomology has been extensively studied via the analysis of quasi-morphisms (see e.g. [Bro81, EF97, Fuj98, BF02, Fuj00] for the case of trivial coefficients, and [HO13, BBF13] for more general coefficient modules). In this paper we exploit quasi-cocycles, which are the higherdimensional analogue of quasi-morphisms, to prove non-vanishing results for bounded cohomology in degree 3. To this aim, we prove that quasi-cocycles may be extended from a hyperbolically embedded family of subgroups to the ambient group. We also discuss the geometric information carried by our extensions of quasi-cocycles, showing in particular that projections on hyperbolically embedded subgroups may be reconstructed from the extensions of suitably chosen quasi-cocycles.Quasi-cocycles and bounded cohomology. Let G be a group, and V be a normed R[G]-space, i.e. a normed real vector space endowed with an