Microsoft outage takes down web search for Bing, DuckDuckGo, Copilot, and others

[Spotty]

Summary

An issue affecting Microsoft Bing has taken down several search engines that rely on Bing's API. Microsoft Bing, Microsoft Copilot, DuckDuckGo, ChatGPT Search, and Ecosia are currently unable to return search results. At time of writing the outage is ongoing and services have been unavailable for several hours, since around 3AM ET according to The Verge. Users attempting to perform web searches are being greeted with an error message.

 

 

 

 

Quotes

Quote

Search capabilities for ChatGPT, Copilot, DuckDuckGo, and other platforms aren't working properly right now due to a Microsoft outage that appears to be related to the Bing application programming interface (API). Sites and services are either completely unavailable or only intermittently responding at the time of publication.

The issues — which began around 3AM ET — appear to be linked to Bing’s API and any service that relies upon it.

Other search engines like DuckDuckGo and Ecosia, which rely on Bing’s API, are unable to load any search results. Microsoft’s Copilot is also experiencing similar issues, displaying a loading loop that prevents users from accessing the service. ChatGPT, which allows Plus subscribers to perform web searches, is similarly displaying an error message when users attempt to make a search enquiry.

 

 

My thoughts

Dozens of Bing users are expected to be impacted by this outage.

 

It will be interesting to follow this story and find out what has caused the outage. Any guesses on what the cause of the outage is? Hackers? Intern tripped on the network cable? Some boring "configuration error" story? My money is on it being Microsoft screwing up trying to add some dumb new AI feature to its search engine that nobody asked for.

 

Sources

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/23/24163094/microsoft-bing-search-outage-copilot-duckduckgo-chatgpt

 

 

[Needfuldoer]

Authorities have released this sketch of the suspected culprit:

 

 

3 minutes ago, Spotty said:

My money is on it being Microsoft screwing up trying to add some dumb new AI feature to its search engine that nobody asked for.

Probably. 

 

You'd think they would concentrate on making a search that works properly, after the backlash against Google started for their enshittifying their search with "AI".

[adm0n]

5 minutes ago, Spotty said:

Dozens of Bing users are expected to be impacted by this outage.

The shade !

[podkall]

5 minutes ago, Spotty said:

Dozens of Bing users are expected to be impacted by this outage.

so not that many people

 

6 minutes ago, Spotty said:

Any guesses on what the cause of the outage is?

there's a small chance it was a slightly more powerful solar flare making some device malfunction, but the AI thing is probably more likely

[joshfrog]

This is funny, if major sites go down everyone knows and yet know one seems to know Microsoft is down LOL

Friends tell me when twitter or other shit is down that i don't use and all i hear is crickets.

 

How will this effect you?

 

Personally this will effect me in so so many ways such as i get to laugh at Microsoft.

[TVwazhere]

23 minutes ago, Spotty said:

Intern tripped on the network cable?

*sigh* @leadeater, again? Really?? we marked it with yellow tape and flags!

[TempestCatto]

How is DuckDuckGo affected by this? I thought it was its own thing. Or does it rely on MS Services but still is otherwise its own thing? Either-way, this will definitely affect the trout population.

[Obioban]

Ah. I was wondering why DDG was failing me this morning.

[Kilrah]

8 minutes ago, TempestCatto said:

How is DuckDuckGo affected by this? I thought it was its own thing.

They have a crawler but it seems rather minor, they're mostly aggregating results from others. Their only major point these days seems to be that Google's not one of them and they don't track searches.

[Spotty]

16 minutes ago, TempestCatto said:

How is DuckDuckGo affected by this? I thought it was its own thing. Or does it rely on MS Services but still is otherwise its own thing? Either-way, this will definitely affect the trout population.

DuckDuckGo uses Bing's search for the bulk of its search results. It does have its own web crawlers and sources some information from other search engines for specialised features of the search engine, but I believe that Bing provides most of the traditional search results (website links).

 

https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/

Quote

Most of our search result pages feature one or more Instant Answers. To deliver Instant Answers on specific topics, DuckDuckGo leverages many sources, including specialized sources like Sportradar and crowd-sourced sites like Wikipedia. We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing. Our focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior search experience.

 

The Maps and Videos search on DDG is currently working, likely because those aren't relying on Bing. Web search, images, and News are currently down.

Spoiler

 

 

[Spotty]

1 hour ago, Needfuldoer said:

You'd think they would concentrate on making a search that works properly, after the backlash against Google started for their enshittifying their search with "AI".

You'd think so, but I doubt it. Seems to be in their interests for them to have these AI bots that give people the answer within the search page and keep people on the search website instead of having eyeballs move on to other websites. Why cut other websites in to that ad revenue by having people visit their site where they are served ads when you can just place the content right inside the search results and place sponsored shopping links alongside it.

 

Was just watching SomeOrdinaryGamers video discussing this earlier...

 

 

Sadly, it probably won't be that long before searching a query and getting the answer given to you is treated as the norm and searching something and visiting websites is considered archaic and cumbersome. It has been the norm for voice assistants for a few years now and for topics like weather which are displayed within the search engine's website. How often do you google the weather and actually click on one of the weather websites instead of just reading the weather forecast given by the weather widget in Google?

Sure, those AI results can give odd responses right now but once AI gets more reliable it's pretty much the end for search engines driving traffic to other websites.

 

But, of course, that only works if your search engine is online. Bing is still offline.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, TVwazhere said:

*sigh* @leadeater, again? Really?? we marked it with yellow tape and flags!

It wasn't an accident

[Spotty]

Looks like DuckDuckGo and Ecosia are now delivering search results. Bing.com is still not responding at all.

 

Spoiler

 

 

[Spotty]

Bing and Microsoft Copilot are now returning search results. Bing search services appear to be restored.

No word yet on what caused the outage.

 

... Somebody should probably tell Bing that they were down for the last 9 hours. Judging by their most recent tweet I don't think Bing has realised yet that Bing was down.

[RejZoR]

I already thought some smartass at work decided to block DuckDuckGo partially in a way that it just errors out. I hate using Google for work because its image searching part is literally pure garbage. Not only it finds whatever stuff, the mosaic trashed images are horrendous to browse. DuckDuckGo just works so much better and I need this a lot to quickly dig product images of all sorts. On top of its search engine just being better even for normal searches. I literally had to use Google which was painful.

[Stahlmann]

Idk why bing still gets so much hate. Even the regular search is miles better than Google these days imo. And the chat search feature has become the main way I look up information on the web. Having a bot scan 5 pages at once and cross-reference information in 10 seconds is so much better than having to do it myself. I look forward to the inevitable GPT-4o implementation in bing search.

[Sauron]

On 5/23/2024 at 3:42 PM, Spotty said:

Why cut other websites in to that ad revenue by having people visit their site where they are served ads when you can just place the content right inside the search results and place sponsored shopping links alongside it.

I know it's a rhetorical question but directing you to other sites is the stated purpose of a search engine

[Kilrah]

27 minutes ago, Sauron said:

is the stated purpose of a search engine

*was