A major outage hit Bing.com, Microsoft’s search engine, early Thursday, with the problem apparently spreading to the brand’s API, meaning services like DuckDuckGo also went down.
ChatGPT and Ecosia are also reportedly affected by the outage. Despite Google’s dominance of the web search world, the Bing API has a number of high-profile clients.
DuckDuckGo issued a brief statement on X. Users were greeted with a panda error page on Bing.com with the message: ‘It’s not you, it’s us.’
‘Notice: We are currently experiencing an issue with DuckDuckGo search that may prevent you from getting results. Thank you for your patience while we get our ducks in a row…,” the company said.
On the X Microsoft365 Status account, the company said it was “investigating an issue where users may not be able to access Microsoft Copilot. We are working to isolate the cause of the problem.”
DuckDuckGo’s statement regarding the outage was published at 9:21 GMT
The news that greeted Bing users in the early hours of Thursday
Downdector.com says there was a spike in outage reports for Bing.com just after 2:00 a.m. ET, the same time DuckDuckGo was also reported to be out.
In various reports about X, users reported that they were either greeted with a blank page or an HTTP 429 error code when trying to log in.
Users claimed that both Bing.com and DuckDuckGo were loading, but neither was producing search results when a query was entered.
The source of the problem has not been identified, but DuckDuckGo said its team is “working to fix this outage” and thanked users for their patience.
As of 7:30 a.m., DailyMail.com was able to successfully perform a Bing search. DuckDuckGo has loaded, but an error occurred while displaying search results.
DuckDuckGo is a private company. In September 2023, founder Gabriel Weinberg revealed that it was bringing in around $100 million in annual revenue while processing only 2.5 percent of US search queries.
By comparison, Google’s parent company Alphabet has nearly $240 billion in revenue. During congressional testimony last year, Weinberg confirmed that much of DuckDuckGo’s search capabilities come from Microsoft’s Bing search engine and are not native.
The company allowed Microsoft to track some DuckDuckGo users until a security researcher reported the practice in 2022.
The Bing outage was first reported around 2:00 a.m. ET
This map shows the regions most affected by the Bing.com outage on Tuesday morning
DuckDuckGo, which accounts for about 2.5 percent of U.S. searches, remained offline in the early hours of Thursday.
This map shows the DuckDuckGo outages and issues reported this morning
Search engine users took to X to express their frustration with the outages.
“Can someone check if the hamsters on wheels went on strike?” Microsoft MVP Michel de Rooij tweeted.
“Bing’s and related services are down.” It’s so frustrating not being able to access chatgpt or copilot even for a few hours!’ one user X wrote.
“Bing and duck duck go are out, basically taking us all back to the stone age where the only way you can smugly reply to someone is if you actually know what you’re talking about,” added another.
“Surely a browser these days shouldn’t crash or have any technical issues!” said one user.
Another quipped: “Looks like all the search engines are down? Is this The Rapture?’
Microsoft’s last major outage occurred in January 2024, when the tech giant’s Teams brand was discontinued in the Americas.
Search engine users took to X to express their frustration with the outages
Teams is a messaging and video conferencing application with more than 320 million average monthly users.
That same month, Microsoft confirmed that a Russian state-backed group hacked into its corporate systems on January 12 and stole some emails and documents from employee accounts.
The Russian group had access to a “very small percentage” of Microsoft’s corporate email accounts, including members of its leadership team and employees in its cyber, legal and other functions, the company said.
Microsoft’s threat research team routinely investigates hackers from nation states such as Russia’s ‘Midnight Blizzard’, which they say is responsible.
The company said its investigation into the breach showed that the hackers initially targeted Microsoft to find out what the tech giant knew about their operations.
The company said hackers used a “password spray attack” starting in November 2023 to breach Microsoft’s platform. Hackers use this technique to infiltrate company systems using the same compromised password against multiple related accounts.