ChatGPT, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia down because of Bing 🤕

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A major outage hit several online services on Thursday morning, temporarily crippling the search functionality of popular platforms such as ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, DuckDuckGo and others. The cause? An unavailability of Microsoft’s Bing API, on which many search engines rely.

A snowball effect 📉

The disruptions began at around 3am ET (9am in France). Bing itself was also affected, before subsequently coming back online. At around 5pm ET, OpenAI confirmed that the problem had been resolved. The outage, although partial, lasted almost 9 hours, impacting ChatGPT web browsing.

DuckDuckGo and Ecosia, the « search engine that plants trees », also reported a return to normal around 4:30pm. Microsoft, for its part, said it was continuing its efforts to fully restore Copilot. Other services were also back up and running after signs of partial recovery.

During the incident, users of ChatGPT, Copilot and other Bing-dependent platforms were confronted with error messages. Endless loading loops were also displayed when attempting to perform web searches.

A reminder of the web’s fragility 😶‍🌫️

This incident highlights the growing dependence on cloud services. And in the event of major outages, the impact on businesses and users is considerable. We all remember the numerous outages suffered by Meta’s platforms. It is important that companies have backup and disaster recovery plans in place to minimize disruption in the event of an outage.

The outage also revealed that many online search engines are really just disguised versions of Bing.

Do you use search engines like Ecosia and DuckDuck Go? Were you affected by the outage? Tell us in comments.