Bing.com, Microsoft’s search engine, was hit by a major outage early on Thursday, with the problem apparently spreading to the brand’s application programming interface, meaning services like DuckDuckGo were also down.
According to reports, the outage will also affect ChatGPT and Ecosia. Despite Google’s dominance in the world of web search, Bing’s API has numerous high-profile customers.
DuckDuckGo issued a brief statement about
Announcement: We’re currently experiencing an issue with DuckDuckGo Search that may be preventing you from getting results. Thank you for your patience as we get our ducks in a row…,” the company said.
About the X account Microsoft365 Status, the company said they were “investigating an issue where users may not be able to access the Microsoft Copilot service.” We are trying to determine the cause of the problem.’
DuckDuckGo’s statement about the outage posted at 9:21 a.m. GMT
The message 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 a.m. eastern time, while DuckDuckGo was also reported as offline at the same time.
In several reports on X, users said they were greeted with a blank page or a 429 HTTP code error when trying to log in.
Users claimed that both Bing.com and DuckDuckGo were loading, but neither produced search results when a search query was typed.
The cause of the issue has not yet been identified, but DuckDuckGo said its team is “working to resolve this outage” and thanked users for their patience.
As of 7:30 AM, DailyMail.com was able to successfully perform a search on Bing. DuckDuckGo’s search engine loaded, but had an “error displaying search results.”
DuckDuckGo is a private company. In September 2023, founder Gabriel Weinberg announced that it brings in about $100 million in annual revenue while handling only 2.5 percent of U.S. searches.
By comparison, Google’s parent company Alphabet has revenues of almost $240 billion. During a congressional testimony last year, Weinberg confirmed that much of DuckDuckGo’s search capabilities came from Microsoft’s Bing search engine and were not homegrown.
The company had allowed Microsoft to track some DuckDuckGo users until a security researcher flagged the practice in 2022.
The Bing outage was first reported around 2 a.m. eastern time
This map shows the regions most affected by the Bing.com outage on Thursday morning
DuckDuckGo, which accounts for about 2.5 percent of searches in the US, remained offline in the early hours of Thursday
This map shows that DuckDuckGo was down and issues were reported this morning
Search engine users have reached out to X to express their frustration with the outages.
“Can anyone check if the hamsters driving the wheels have gone on strike?” Microsoft MVP Michel de Rooij tweeted.
‘Bing’s and related services are down. It feels so frustrating not to have access to chatgpt or copilot for even a few hours!’ wrote one X user.
“Bing and duck duck go are disabled, essentially taking us all back to the stone age where the only way to respond smugly to someone is if you actually know what you’re talking about,” another added.
‘Nowadays a browser should never fail or have technical problems!’ said one user.
Another joked: ‘All search engines seem to be offline? Is this the Rapture?’
Microsoft’s last major outage came in January 2024, when the tech giant’s Teams brand went bankrupt in the Americas.
Search engine users have reached out to X to express their frustration with the outages
Teams is a messaging and video conferencing app with an average of over 320 million monthly users.
That same month, Microsoft confirmed that a Russian state-sponsored group had hacked into its corporate systems on January 12 and stolen some emails and documents from staff accounts.
The Russian group had access to “a very small percentage” of Microsoft corporate email accounts, including members of its senior leadership team and employees in cybersecurity, legal and other functions, the company said.
Microsoft’s threat research team routinely investigates nation-state hackers, such as Russia’s ‘Midnight Blizzard’, who they believe are responsible.
The company said its investigation into the breach indicated that the hackers initially targeted Microsoft to learn what the tech giant knew about its activities.
The company said the hackers used a “password spray attack” to breach a Microsoft platform starting in November 2023. Hackers use this technique to infiltrate a company’s systems by using the same compromised password for multiple related accounts.