A major outage hit Bing.com, Microsoft’s search engine, early Thursday, and the problem apparently spread 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, the Bing API has numerous high-profile customers.
Microsoft has yet to comment on the outage, while DuckDuckGo issued a brief statement about X.
‘Announcement: We are currently experiencing an issue with DuckDuckGo Search that may prevent you from getting results. Thank you for your patience while we put matters in order…’ the company said.
Downdector.com says there was a spike in outage reports for Bing.com just after 2:00 a.m. ET, at the same time DuckDuckGo was also reported to be down.
TechCrunch reported that around 5:00 a.m. Eastern Time, Bing.com and DuckDuckGo were back online.
In several reports on X, users said they were greeted with a blank page or an HTTP code 429 error when they tried to log in.
DuckDuckGo statement on the outage posted at 9:21 am GMT
A Microsoft Bing logo displayed on a smartphone with a GPT Chat logo in the background