By Natasha Anderson and Paul Farrell for Dailymail.Com
14:49 May 23, 2024, updated 14:55 May 23, 2024
- Social media users said a “browser should never fail these days”
Internet users have vented their anger at Microsoft after a technical glitch today disrupted several of the company’s services, including its search engines.
Bing.com and DuckDuckGo experienced a major outage early Thursday morning, and users were still reporting problems more than seven hours later.
The outage also reportedly affects ChatGPT and Ecosia. Despite Google’s dominance in the world of web search, Bing’s API has numerous high-profile customers.
Frustrated users complained about the outage on social media platform X, claiming that “a browser should never go down these days.”
One tech fan said the outage “takes us all back to the Stone Age,” and another joked that the failure of several search engines meant the end of the world was imminent.
In various reports on X, users reported that they were greeted with either a blank page or an HTTP code error 429 when attempting to log in.
Users reported that both Bing.com and DuckDuckGo loaded, but neither provided search results when a query was entered.
“Bing and similar services are down. It’s so frustrating not having access to ChatGPT or Copilot for even a few hours!” wrote one X user about the outage.
“Can anyone check if the hamsters in the hamster wheel have gone on strike?” tweeted Microsoft MVP Michel de Rooij.
“Bing and Duck Duck Go are down and are essentially taking us all back to the Stone Age where you couldn’t smugly reply to someone unless you actually knew what you were talking about,” added another.
“Nowadays, a browser should never crash or have technical issues!” explained one user.
Another joked: “All search engines seem to be down? Is this The Rapture?”
Downdector.com says there was a spike in outage reports for Bing.com just after 2 a.m. Eastern time, the same time DuckDuckGo was reported outage.
DuckDuckGo issued a brief statement on X. Users were shown an error page with a panda on Bing.com and the message “It’s not you, it’s us.”
“Announcement: We are currently experiencing an issue with DuckDuckGo search that may be causing you to not receive results. Thank you for your patience while we get everything fixed…” the company said.
Regarding the Microsoft365 status of the X account, the company said it is “investigating an issue where users may be unable to access the Microsoft Copilot service. We are working to isolate the cause of the issue.”
The cause of the problem 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 a.m., DailyMail.com was able to successfully perform a search on Bing. DuckDuckGo’s search engine loaded, but an “error displaying search results” occurred.
DuckDuckGo is a privately held company. In September 2023, founder Gabriel Weinberg announced that the company generates annual revenue of around $100 million while handling only 2.5 percent of U.S. searches.
By comparison, Google’s parent company Alphabet generates revenue of nearly $240 billion. During testimony before Congress last year, Weinberg confirmed that much of DuckDuckGo’s search functionality comes from Microsoft’s search engine Bing and was not developed in-house.
The company had allowed Microsoft to track some DuckDuckGo users until a security researcher uncovered the practice in 2022.
The last major outage at Microsoft occurred in January 2024, when the tech giant’s Teams brand went down in North and South America.
Teams is a messaging and video conferencing app with an average of over 320 million users per month.
That same month, Microsoft confirmed that a Russian state-sponsored group had breached its corporate systems on January 12 and stolen some emails and documents from employee accounts.
The Russian group was able to access a “very small percentage” of Microsoft’s email accounts, including those of senior management, cybersecurity, legal and other employees, the company said.
Microsoft’s threat research team regularly investigates state hackers, such as the Russian hacker “Midnight Blizzard”, who is believed to be responsible for the attack.
The company said its investigation into the data breach revealed that the hackers initially targeted Microsoft to find out what the technology giant knew about the company’s activities.
The company said the hackers used a “password spray attack” to break into a Microsoft platform starting in November 2023. Hackers use this technique to break into a company’s systems by using the same compromised password for multiple related accounts.