- 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.’
DuckDuckGo’s statement regarding the outage posted at 9:21am GMT
The message that greeted Bing Users in the early hours of Thursday
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.
The Bing outage was first reported around 2:00am eastern time
DuckDuckGo, which accounts for about 2.5 percent of search queries in the US, remained down in the early hours of Thursday
Microsoft’s last major outage occurred in January 2024 when the tech giant’s Teams brand went down in North and South America.
Teams is a messaging and videoconferencing app with over 320 million monthly average users.
That same month, Microsoft confirmed that a Russian state-sponsored group hacked into its corporate systems on Jan. 12 and stole some emails and documents from staff accounts.
The Russian group was able to access ‘a very small percentage’ of Microsoft corporate email accounts, including members of its senior leadership team and employees in its 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 say is responsible.
The company said its probe into the breach indicated the hackers were initially targeting Microsoft to learn what the technology giant knew about their operations.
The company said the hackers used a ‘password spray attack’ starting in Nov. 2023 to breach a Microsoft platform. Hackers use this technique to infiltrate a company’s systems by using the same compromised password against multiple related accounts.