- Microsoft has said that they are investigating the cause of the issue
- DuckDuckGo issued a brief statement on X confirming their service was down
A major outage struck Bing.com, Microsoft’s search engine, early Thursday with the problem apparently spreading to the brand’s application programming interface which means that services such as DuckDuckGo also went down.
According to reports the outage also impacts ChatGPT and Ecosia. Despite Google’s dominance in the world of web searching, Bing’s API has numerous high profile clients.
DuckDuckGo issued a brief statement on X. Users were greeted with an error page featuring a panda on Bing.com with the message: ‘It’s not you, it’s us.’
‘Announcement: We’re currently experiencing an issue with DuckDuckGo Search that might prevent you from getting results. Thanks for your patience while we get our ducks in a row…,’ the company said.
On the X account Microsoft365 Status, the company said they were ‘investigating an issue where users may be unable to access the Microsoft Copilot service. We’re working to isolate the cause of the issue.’
Downdector.com says that there was spike in outage reports for Bing.com just after 2:00 am eastern time, at the same time DuckDuckGo was also reported as down.
In various reports on X, users said that they were either greeted with a blank page or a 429 HTTP code error when they attempted to log on.
Both Bing.com and DuckDuckGo were loading but neither were producing search results when a query was typed.
The source of the problem has not been identified.
DuckDuckGo is a privately held company. In September 2023, founder Gabriel Weinberg disclosed that it brings in around $100 million in annual revenue while handling just 2.5 percent of US search queries.
By comparison, Google’s parent Alphabet has revenues of close $240 billion. During a congressional testimony last year, Weinberg confirmed that much of DuckDuckGo’s search capability originated with Microsoft’s Bing search engine and was not homegrown.
The company had allowed Microsoft to track some DuckDuckGo users until a security researcher flagged the practice in 2022.
Laura Adams is a tech enthusiast residing in the UK. Her articles cover the latest technological innovations, from AI to consumer gadgets, providing readers with a glimpse into the future of technology.
