Bing and DuckDuckGo offline overnight, Google says thanks for the data

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—by Protos Staff

A massive, multi-hour outage of Microsoft’s application programming interface (API) used by its Bing search division has caused unprecedented interruptions for millions of people.

Bing, which has over 9% global search market share, also serves critical features for the privacy-conscious DuckDuckGo search engine, AI tools like ChatGPT, and the code development assistant CoPilot. All were offline today for a number of hours.

Complaints rained in across social media as default search engines for millions of browsers returned errors, suspenseful spinning icons, empty search results, and error pages.

Protos reporters began experiencing search engine errors on Bing and DuckDuckGo a couple of hours after midnight New York time.

Problems at Microsoft look to have begun as early as late Wednesday. By 8pm, Microsoft admitted, “We’re aware of and investing reported issues accessing the Microsoft 365 admin center.”

Search engines for millions of browsers returned spinning icons, empty search results, and error pages.

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To call Microsoft a giant is an understatement. It’s the largest publicly traded company in the US with a $3.2 trillion market cap. Despite its size — and trillion-dollar lead on the size of its competitor, Google — it has less than 10% global market share of search queries.

Google, by far the world’s dominant search engine, has over 83% market share.

Google remained online during the Bing and DuckDuckGo outages, providing it hours of invaluable search data from frustrated users of its competitors.

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