Giant outage hits Bing, Copilot, DuckDuckGo and other services

Wind of panic at Microsoft, with several services in great difficulty in recent hours. Among the victims: Ecosia, Qwant, DuckDuckGo, but also a certain Microsoft Bing.

While services have regained momentum over the hours, Microsoft went through a very bad patch yesterday afternoon. Many services, based (more or less) on Bing, have thus experienced serious shortcomings, sometimes with total dysfunction.

Outages for DuckDuckGo, Qwant, ChatGPT…

This is particularly the case for the DuckDuckGo search engine. If everything is back to normal today, the latter has experienced a total breakdown in recent hours, the searches carried out by Internet users not returning any results, except a message announcing an error during the display search results.

Same concern on the side of ChatGPT, OpenAI having also recognized a major malfunction, to the great dismay of all those who use AI every day. Yesterday, on the X.com platform, Microsoft indicated: “ We are investigating an issue preventing users from accessing the Microsoft Copilot service. We are working to isolate the cause of the problem. »

Bing’s fault?

Among the other services affected, we find Qwant, or even Ecosia. These products share a common denominator, namely the fact of relying on Microsoft’s search engine: Bing.

Indeed, this same Bing experienced a major outage yesterday, preventing any form of search. Immediately, all services relying more or less on the Microsoft search engine API were in turn hit by a similar malfunction.

Note that on the side of Brave, another web browser (of which our complete test can be found here), we quickly made fun of this generalized failure by indicating: “ These outages highlight the need for truly independent search engines, such as Brave Search. » The group particularly pointed out the dependence (on Bing) of the services in question.

Source : Bleeping Computer