By Paul Farrell and Natasha Anderson for Dailymail.Com
10:55 May 23, 2024, updated 13:06 May 23, 2024
- Microsoft has stated that it is investigating the cause of the problem
- DuckDuckGo issued a brief statement to X, confirming that their service was down
Bing.com, Microsoft’s search engine, suffered a major outage early Thursday, with the problem apparently spreading to the brand’s application programming interface, meaning services like DuckDuckGo were also down.
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.
DuckDuckGo issued a brief statement on X. Users were greeted with an error page featuring a panda on Bing.com that said, “It’s not you, it’s us.”
“Announcement: We are currently experiencing an issue with DuckDuckGo search that may prevent you from receiving results. Thank you for your patience as we get everything sorted…” 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.”
Downdector.com says there was a spike in outage reports for Bing.com just after 2 a.m. Eastern time; At the same time, the DuckDuckGo outage was also reported.
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 claimed that both Bing.com and DuckDuckGo loaded, but neither returned search results when a search query was entered.
The cause of the problem was not identified, but DuckDuckGo said its team was “working to resolve this outage” and thanked users for their patience.
As of 7:30 a.m., DailyMail.com was able to successfully conduct a search on Bing. The DuckDuckGo 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 generated around $100 million in annual revenue while only serving 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 reported the practice in 2022.
Search engine users have expressed their displeasure over the outages on X.
“Can someone check if the hamsters walking on the wheels have gone on strike?” Microsoft MVP Michel de Rooij tweeted.
“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.
“Bing and Duck Duck Go are down, essentially taking us all back to the Stone Age, where you could only smugly answer someone if you actually knew what you were talking about,” another added.
“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?”
Microsoft’s last major outage occurred in January 2024, when the tech giant’s Teams brand failed in North and South America.
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 hacked into its company’s systems on January 12 and stole some emails and documents from employee accounts.
The Russian group was able to access a “very small percentage” of Microsoft’s email accounts. These are members of the top management as well as employees in cybersecurity, legal and other areas, 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 leak revealed that the hackers initially targeted Microsoft to find out what the tech giant knew about the company’s activities.
The company said that starting in November 2023, the hackers used a “password spray attack” to break into a Microsoft platform. Hackers use this technique to break into a company’s systems by using the same compromised password for multiple related accounts.